by Mark Frost
“Was he too late?” asked Nick.
“By the night of that dinner, we’d already received the first weeks of treatments. Only injections at that point, but they’d gone flawlessly. We all felt healthy, strong, optimistic. Better than we’d ever felt, honestly.” His eyes clouded over with pain. “And Abelson was convinced that Wallace never suspected a thing.”
“But he was wrong,” said Will, studying him closely. “Wallace was on to you, wasn’t he?”
Nepsted closed his eyes, his face etched by the pain of the memories. “We were scheduled to begin the final stages. Two weeks of intense therapies that required us to remain secluded, out of sight.”
“How did they work that?” asked Nick.
“They created a cover story for our absence. The Knights traditionally took a senior year trip together; we’d be going to Europe, with Dr. Abelson as our chaperone. We staged everything to make it appear real.”
“The dinner was part of this?”
“Yes, to commemorate the trip. We packed our bags and the next night threw a farewell party. Over two hundred students came to send us off. The next morning we boarded a chartered plane. An hour into the flight we turned around, landed at a nearby airfield, and snuck back in the dead of night. That’s when they took us down to that hospital for the first time.”
“On that big elevator?” asked Will.
“Yes. They’d built that to help the construction, with a reception area to make it look normal and put us at ease. But before that, not everything went according to plan. Frank never got on that plane with us,” said Nepsted, his face cycling through another set of changes. “Dr. Abelson told us he’d been taken ill.”
“That wasn’t true?” asked Will.
“No. That was how they got Frank away from Abelson. We never saw him again.”
“And you think this was Wallace’s doing.”
Nepsted nodded. “Henry Wallace helped Thomas Greenwood rescue his son. That’s why he came in the first place. But Abelson didn’t seem concerned. In fact, he told us that Frank had been given a more important assignment.”
“If his father knew the score, why didn’t he get the rest of you out of there?” asked Nick.
“I don’t know the answer. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe it’s because we weren’t his sons. Most of us never saw Frank again.”
“Most of you never left that building,” said Will.
“What happened down there, Raymond?” asked Nick softly.
Nepsted paused, and the words came much more haltingly. “We’d been in the hospital only a few days. Confined to our rooms. The new treatments were much more painful than before. As it grew worse, they kept us drugged … and then the process went wrong. Just one of us at first—George Gage, from Baltimore. We woke up one morning and George was gone. After that the others turned quickly. In less than a month.” Nepsted blinked repeatedly, his eyes filled with sorrow. “I saw them, Will.”
Will’s whole body shook with an anger that he had to work hard to contain. “We saw them, too. They’re still down there.”
“I know,” said Nepsted.
“Saw what?” asked Ajay blankly. “How could you have seen them?”
“Dude, were they in that room with those big tanks?” asked Nick.
“I’ll explain later,” said Will, and made sure Nick got the message before he turned back to Nepsted. “Keep going, Raymond.”
“We’d been living in a barracks together, but they separated us in locked rooms like jail cells once the others started disappearing.”
“We saw those, too,” said Nick.
“They took the others away one by one, until nine had vanished. None of the staff would tell us what had happened or where they’d gone. But I saw George, or what he’d become.”
“Until only two of you were left,” said Will. “You and Edgar Snow.”
“That’s right, Will,” said Nepsted. “Our cells were next to each other. We could whisper at night through the bars. They kept us for months, watching, testing constantly, but neither of us changed or got sick like the others. In the meantime—I found this out much later—they’d staged the crash to explain our disappearance. They dropped a real plane into Lake Superior, saying it had gone down on its way back from Europe. Of course no bodies were ever recovered.”
That sounds familiar, too, thought Will.
“So they put up that memorial,” said Will. “And all your families thought you were dead.”
“Yes. Edgar and I realized we were prisoners. Locks on the doors now. Then I woke up one morning to find that they’d taken Edgar, too. I assumed he’d gotten sick like the others and if he was still alive that he must have thought the same about me.”
“But you were normal,” said Ajay. “Nothing had changed.”
“Oh yes, perfectly normal. A picture of health.” He held up his hands in a mockery of contentment. “I went on living, adjusting as best I could to solitary confinement. I was an only child, never many friends, so I was used to being alone. The nurses brought me my books and let me study, screened movies for me, brought me newspapers, always treated me kindly. But I soon realized that they had no intention of letting me conduct my life as ‘Raymond’ again. After the ‘accident,’ that was out of the question. Which I learned a year later, when Edgar came to see me.”
“Why?”
“To convince me to cooperate. Show me that the program had been a success after all. Because Edgar had changed, finally, but the process hadn’t killed or disfigured him. He’d lost his hair, he was much bigger and stronger, but beyond that he looked the same. He showed me these abilities—the things he could do just by looking at something, his strength and physical invulnerability, impervious to pain, disease, or heat or cold—and how he’d learn to control them. Even more striking as far as they were concerned was that Edgar could appear perfectly normal whenever he wanted or needed to.”
“He was one of them now,” said Will. “A Knight.”
Nepsted nodded. “Edgar’d always had the light of a fanatic in his eyes, but it burned brighter than ever now. And why not? His existence meant Abelson’s plan had delivered one of the Holy Warriors he’d promised to create.”
“For what reason?” asked Will.
“To serve the Knights. They knew better, you see, than governments or countries. They believed a war was coming that would destroy the world. The Knights would be the only force strong enough to survive and build a new civilization from the ashes.”
“So Edgar Snow became the first modern Paladin,” said Ajay. “Which made the rest of their failures acceptable.”
“And if he’d survived, that meant they hoped the same could happen to you,” said Will.
“That’s why they kept me down there, Will,” said Nepsted.
“Was Abelson still in charge?” asked Nick.
“No, he stopped coming a few months after they took us down here—I never saw him again after that.”
“When was this?” asked Will.
“Early spring of 1939. From then on I only saw Edgar. I came to accept that he was in charge. He told me Thomas Greenwood had fired Dr. Abelson when he outlawed the Knights on campus. A few months after he rescued his son. I don’t know what happened to Abelson.”
“How much did Greenwood know?” asked Will. “He must have found out about the hospital.”
“News of what the headmaster did or didn’t know, and when he did or didn’t know it, never reached me,” said Nepsted with a wan smile. “I remained a prisoner down there for the next fourteen years.”
“My God,” said Ajay.
“And in all that time, I never changed. By that I mean I was exactly the same. All through my captivity I’d never been sick, never so much as caught a cold. And I never aged a day.”
Again Will remembered some of Nepsted’s first words to him: I’m a lot older t
han I look.
This is starting to sound too much like what’s happening to us, thought Will.
“So you see their treatments had worked after all, just not in any way they’d anticipated. The only thing that changed was my willingness to cooperate. From the moment I saw the first mutations, I refused to be part of it, even if it meant living in that cell for the rest of my life.”
“Did they tell you anything else? Anything about the ancient city they’d found?” asked Ajay. “Or the older race of beings that lived there?”
“No. I only knew what I read in the magazines and newspapers they gave me,” said Nepsted. “Until 1956. When for reasons I never learned, Edgar told me my captors had been moved by some charitable impulse to let me go. Under certain conditions.”
“What were they?” asked Will.
“I would be set up in a different life. Under a new name, in a distant city. Flagstaff, Arizona.”
“Why would they just let you go after all that?” asked Nick.
“I think I know why,” said Will. “In 1956?”
“That’s right.”
“That was the year Franklin became headmaster of the Center,” said Will. “He must have had something to do with it.”
One of Nepsted’s tendrils slipped out of the liquid and trailed over the edge of the tank, searching for and then digging out an old notebook, buried among the random stacks of books and debris on the edge of the light.
“I believe you’re right, Will,” said Nepsted. “I think Frank took pity on me. Perhaps he felt real remorse about all that happened to us, or his youthful role in it.”
“What did Edgar tell you?”
“How easily he’d slipped into his new life—he called himself Hobbes now—and that I could do the same. He even offered an apology, that none of this should have happened to us, that the hospital would be destroyed along with all records of these events. I would be free to start this new life, as long as I kept to myself and never spoke about it to anyone.”
“And you believed him?” asked Nick.
“What choice did I have? I’d been alone so long I didn’t know a single soul on the outside anymore. Hobbes drove me to Flagstaff himself. They’d created a whole new identity for me. He gave me the car we’d used to get there and enough money to start over. About a week later I got a job in a hardware store, the only trade I knew, and it hadn’t changed much.”
More tendrils flowed down after the first one, helping to lift the notebook, opening it and holding it up so the boys could see inside. It was a scrapbook, with pages of faded snapshots fastened with little plastic triangles at the corners.
Will’s eye fell on a yellowing shot of Nepsted standing in front of a sun-drenched hardware store. The cars on the street looked to be from the early to mid-1960s.
“I was thirty-seven years old and still looked like I was eighteen,” said Nepsted. “I’d never lived on my own. I hadn’t been out in the world in nearly twenty years. Edgar was always kind to me, but he made it clear the Knights would be watching at all times, and if I tried to run or contact my family, or tell anyone about what had happened they’d bring me back here for good. I never even knew if my parents were still alive. I was so eager to be free I agreed to everything.”
Nepsted took in a sharp breath, having trouble containing his emotions. Ajay looked like he was about to cry, too. Will took the scrapbook from Nepsted and slowly paged through the frozen moments of Nepsted’s new life.
“And I believed him. That they would know if I ever spoke to anyone about what we’d gone through, but also that they’d put a stop to the program. So I obeyed their rules, and kept completely to myself, for nine years. Edgar never came to see me again, so eventually I stopped thinking so much about the warnings he’d given me.”
Will turned the page and saw a photograph of Nepsted in a park with his arm around the waist of a pretty slender young woman with long brown hair.
“By the time I fell in love with Julie, I scarcely gave what Edgar’d told me a second thought. I stuck to my story, never told her a word about what had really happened. By then it hardly felt like lying. As far as I was concerned, I really was Stephen Nepsted, since that’s where and when my life had actually started. They started calling me Happy at the hardware store as a joke, because I looked so serious all the time … but for a while, after I met Julie, I really was happy.”
On the next page Will found photographs of a simple wedding in a small chapel, just Raymond and Julie—in everyday clothes—standing with a minister and a witness.
“Dude, you got married?” asked Nick.
“We’d gone together for two years. No one had bothered us, Edgar had never appeared, so the week I turned forty-one, we drove to Vegas and found one of those ridiculous chapels.”
One of Nepsted’s tendrils tenderly traced another photo of him standing with his smiling bride, who held a small bouquet.
“Julie was twenty-three, but our age difference never mattered to me. In most ways I wasn’t really older than I looked, even though I hadn’t aged since I’d reached Flagstaff.”
The three roommates huddled together, looking at the photos, the only sound in the room the soft burbling of the liquid in the tub. The last photo was of Julie posing in a small bedroom that had been converted into a nursery.
“I’d lied to Julie that we shouldn’t have kids, health issues in my family, so we had to be careful. But she got pregnant anyway, and I tried to pretend, I wanted so badly to believe everything would be okay . …”
Nepsted couldn’t continue for a moment.
“Is that when it happened, Raymond?” asked Will gently.
Nepsted nodded. “The stress brought it on I think … all the terrible fears it brought back … what they’d done to me laid dormant all those years, the treatments … but then I started to change … into this . …”
Will turned the page. The rest were blank.
“I tried to hide at first, hide it from everyone … and I did for a while … but then, in small ways, it began to … happen in public. I controlled the mutations as best I could, but after a while my ‘normal’ body started to change, too, permanently. I couldn’t keep my job. I didn’t know how I’d support my family when the baby was born. Then one day after work I found Edgar waiting in my car. He never threatened me; he knew I hadn’t betrayed our agreement. He said he only wanted to help. But he could only do that by bringing me back here. Where they could give me a place to live and take care of me again.”
Tears softly rolled down Nepsted’s cheeks. Will noticed Nick wiping the corner of his eye.
“Edgar promised he’d take care of my family, too … but they’d have to believe I was dead. I didn’t know what else to do. He was right, in some ways. If people found out what I really was, what kind of life could we have had, what kind of future would there be for my wife and son? I had no choice, you see?”
“I guess I do, Raymond,” said Will.
“Edgar arranged a life insurance policy. So Julie and Henry would have everything they needed,” said Nepsted.
“Except a father and a husband,” said Nick under his breath.
Will hushed him.
“I had one condition: I told him I could never go back to that hospital,” said Nepsted, shaking his head slowly. “I needed a real place in the world, and a real job that had meaning and contact with younger people so I could … have some idea of the life my son might be living.”
“You’ve never even seen him, have you?” asked Nick.
“I left Flagstaff a month before Henry was born. They staged a car accident that even the insurance company believed.”
“They’re good at that,” said Will.
“Edgar flew me here in a private plane at night. Brought me to this room. In 1974. And I’ve been here ever since. The equipment manager in the boy’s locker room.”
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“Though still a prisoner, Raymond?” asked Ajay.
“That lock was my idea,” said Nepsted, shaking his head vigorously. “I didn’t want to be tempted to leave. If the kids saw me when I couldn’t control my appearance, if they suspected I was anything other than the cripple behind the screen who gave them their sneakers, even this much might get taken away from me.”
“So why’d you ask us to find the key for you?” said Nick, puzzled.
“What changed, Raymond?” asked Will.
Nepsted lowered his voice. “I hear whispers. People tell me things or I overhear them. Sometimes I even hear their thoughts. When they look at this cage they don’t know how carefully I’m watching and listening. And many years ago, almost twenty now, I realized that the Knights of Charlemagne had come back to the Center.”
Will felt a chill run up the nape of his neck.
“In fact, it seems they’d never left. I assumed Edgar was in charge, and had been all along, but I was wrong. He was now taking orders from someone else.”
“Franklin?” asked Will.
“No, from everything I’ve learned, he turned against the Knights, too,” said Nepsted. “And Frank died in 1995. Whoever’s leading them now is a person with powerful allies.”
Haxley, thought Will.
“Three generations of former Knights are out in the world,” said Nepsted, “a hidden network of prominent men in positions of tremendous power and influence. Edgar hinted that something new was in the wind, something unimaginable.”
“A new program based on Abelson’s ideas,” said Will, glancing at Ajay and Nick. “Genetic manipulation. It’s called the Paladin Prophecy.”
“Good Lord,” said Nepsted, surprised. “What else have you learned about it, Will?”
“It’s heavily funded, well organized, and may involve a lot more people this time. Raymond, is it possible Franklin could have found out the Knights reactivated the Paladin program and tried to stop them?”
Nepsted read the suggestion in Will’s eye. “You mean, so they killed him?”
“Yes.”
“It’s possible. You have to understand—I think you already do—that these people let nothing stand in their way. Is it exactly the same program they used on us?” asked Raymond, his voice quivering.