So it was that at just before five on a day in which his entire understanding of the Secret Future collapsed around him, Corry ended up standing in the lobby and wondering how he was going to get back into the common room without attracting attention. The part of his twelve-year-old brain that had been fed a regular diet of horror stories about strangers and Bad Touching knew this was probably a terrible idea, but his curiosity was just too great to ignore. He had to try.
Getting from the lobby to the hospital’s ward rooms corridor was not, by itself, a difficult task. The door between the two wasn’t locked during the day because the Mildly Crazies weren’t very dangerous. And since all of them were wealthy and most of them were there because they’d put themselves in, it didn’t benefit anybody to make the place look like a prison. At least not this wing of it.
The hard part was getting past Ned.
If it had been anybody else, it wouldn’t have been a problem. Unlike the staff inside the hospital—like Violet and Janet—the person at the front desk was different almost every day. Corry asked about it once and found out that the security staff had a rotating schedule, with the only exception being Carl in the parking lot booth, only because Carl couldn’t get around so well anymore.
Most of the desk staff was nice and very easygoing. If he said to one of them that he had forgotten something in the common room, they’d let him head back alone to get it and probably wouldn’t even notice he’d been gone for longer than it should have taken him to fetch something and return. But Ned wasn’t going to be that easy.
Corry had never heard Ned tell a story in which he wasn’t the hero. He seemed to live a life of adventure in a world in which he was the only person who knew the right thing to do, and everyone else—his wife, family, friends, coworkers—was a complete idiot. Corry used to be impressed by Ned and his stories until one day when he witnessed Ned giving a hard time to a guest who was trying to obtain post-visiting hour permission. The incident itself was minor and ultimately involved phoning up a doctor who escorted the guest through. But a week later Corry heard Ned describe the event to one of the orderlies, and from the sound of it one might have concluded Ned had dealt handily with a terrorist holding a live bomb. From that point on, he didn’t believe a word the man said.
Ned would never let him go in back unescorted, and if he did, he would probably have him on a stopwatch the whole time. So Corry would have to figure out a way to outsmart him if he wanted to have his conversation with Mr. Nilsson.
Standing in the lobby, Corry watched the parking lot through the glass double doors and listened to the clock over the exit as it ticked away the time. It was five o’clock. Somewhere, Mr. Parseghian was shouting. Probably. Unless they didn’t let him have a clock in his room which, when he thought about it, was probably the smart thing. That gave him an idea. It was a stupid idea, but Ned was pretty stupid, so it might work.
“Hey,” Corry said, trying desperately to sound casual. “Is Mr. Parseghian all better?”
Ned was busy staring at some random paperwork at his desk, or rather, at the racing forms hidden underneath the random paperwork. He had video monitors to stare at, too, showing black-and-white closed-circuit camera images of the front door and the back door. “Who?” he asked.
“Mr. Parseghian. The guy who announces the time.”
“Oh. Him?” He laughed. “Christ, kid, I don’t think he’s ready for the outside world, do you? And I’m not even a doctor . . .”
Corry interrupted, as surely a lengthy tale in which Ned out-diagnosed somebody with a degree was sure to follow. “Then how come I just saw him hop into a car?”
Ned smiled for as long as it took to realize Corry wasn’t going to say ha-ha, just kidding. He stood up. “You fucking with me?”
“No, serious. It’s that car right there.” Corry pointed at a car that was now backing out of a parking space. The person inside of it was actually one of the assistant directors of the hospital—a guy named Walter who always had cough drop breath. He’d come out of one of the staff exits a few minutes ago.
Ned toddled out from behind the counter and pulled his huge walkie-talkie off his belt. He got to the front door just in time to see the car reach the gate. “Stay here, kid,” he said as he hit the door. Ned ran out, shouting commands to Carl on his radio. It should have occurred to Ned that the only way Mr. Parseghian could have gotten out was via the door he’d just used—or possibly through the back door, where he’d have been spotted on the surveillance camera—but Ned was too busy acting to stop and think. Stupid, Corry confirmed.
Corry figured he had maybe five minutes before Ned came back again, which was enough time to make it down the hall but probably not enough to get back. But one thing at a time.
He ran past the now-vacant reception desk and down the hall. Thanks to the Secret Future, he knew he was alone for the trip there, which was good fortune all around. And that same Secret Future told him the room ahead was empty, so Mr. Nilsson hadn’t made it there yet.
He was about to round the corner into the common room when someone grabbed him from behind and yanked him into the bathroom. He nearly screamed, but a hand was clapped over Corry’s mouth before anything could escape. It was the first time in his entire life something happened in Corry’s future that he didn’t see coming, and he was justifiably freaked out by it, so much so that it didn’t initially occur to him that the person who nabbed him had to be the guy he was there to see.
The door to the bathroom slammed shut and the light came on, and only then did Mr. Nilsson release him. Corry pushed away and ended up standing beside the door, visibly trembling. “How do you do that?” he demanded angrily.
Mr. Nilsson didn’t answer right away. Instead, he sat himself down on the toilet and studied his young sort-of captive. Sitting made him less impressive, which helped Corry calm down, because this way the older man wasn’t looming over him anymore. More significantly, if Corry wanted to jerk the door open and run out, Mr. Nilsson probably couldn’t stop him.
“I’m sorry I frightened you,” he said finally.
“Yeah, you did,” Corry answered angrily, wiping an inadvertent tear from the corner of his eye. “Nobody’s s’posed to be able to sneak up on me.” Later, he would be ashamed to have gotten rattled so easily. Other kids deal with surprises every day; he shouldn’t have that much trouble with them.
“How long have you been able to see?” the old man asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Corry fiddled with the belt loop on his pants, a nervous thing he did mostly in school when he didn’t know the answer to a direct question or when Violet got especially angry with him. “All my life, I think,” he said.
“You handle it well.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean that sincerely. I have met two others like us in my life. You’re the youngest and by far the most stable.”
“There are others?” Corry asked. This surprised him.
“A few.”
“You see it too, huh?”
“Yes, of course. How else do you suppose I could have snuck up on you? I changed the future. You and I are the only ones here capable of doing that.”
“You seem okay with it,” Corry said. “I mean, stable. You’re stable.”
Mr. Nilsson smiled. “Am I? Think about where we are.”
“I mean . . .” Corry hedged. “Right now, you’re okay. And you can do that . . . thing with the talking and not talking.”
The old man sat up, so that the back of his head was touching a rack full of toilet paper. It didn’t look real comfortable. “Do you see your own actions in the future?” he asked.
“Sure. Don’t you?”
“Yes, of course. And do you follow through with those actions?”
“Usually. Unless I’m about to get hurt or something.”
“Exactly. There’s no trick to what I did earlier, Master Corry. All I’m doing is electing not to say what
I would have otherwise said. It takes some practice, but that’s all. I used to do it in boardroom meetings to keep from dozing off, although then I never had anyone else around to appreciate it. You’ll figure it out.”
“Oh. Okay,” Corry said, wondering what a bored room meeting was.
Mr. Nilsson smiled. “How far can you see?”
Corry thought about it. “Dunno. Five or six seconds. Depends on how much is going on.”
“Gets blurry after that, does it?”
“Yeah, kinda.”
He nodded.
“Can you see more than that?” Corry asked.
“Sometimes. If I sit very still and think very hard for a very long time; sometimes.”
“Huh.”
“I prefer not to.”
“Why not?”
“Sometimes I just want to be surprised,” he said without elaboration.
This conversation wasn’t exactly what Corry had been expecting. Not that he was sure what to expect, but this wasn’t it.
“So what are we?” Corry asked, getting to what he thought was the point of this conversation.
“What . . .” Mr. Nilsson laughed. “We’re people. Did you suppose we were aliens or some such?”
“Dunno.” Corry blushed. “Maybe. Or superheroes.”
“Ah, well . . . I am long past the opportunity to be a hero of any kind, young man. You, however, have a lifetime to work on that. Is that what you’d like to do with your gifts?”
“Maybe, yeah.”
“It’s an admirable goal.” He stared hard at Corry, as if by doing so he could look a decade or two ahead. “Yes. I do think if you wanted to, you could become a . . . superhero, as you said.” He smiled. “That’s a fantastic idea.”
Corry beamed. Finally, someone else he could talk to about the Secret Future. He’d have to learn how to do that secret talking trick so they could speak without sneaking off together. And that reminded him, Carl was most surely done bothering Walter.
“Look,” Corry said, “I should probably—”
“No, not yet,” Mr. Nilsson said. “There’s a reason I wanted to talk to you alone.” He leaned forward again. “There are others.”
“Others like us? You said that already.”
“No. Yes. Yes, there are others like us. That’s not what I mean. I mean there are others. I don’t know what they are, but I can see them. Nobody else can. Except you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Corry said. There was a slight change in Mr. Nilsson’s voice; it was subtle but enough to make Corry want to get away from him.
“These others, they’re there at the edge. Do you understand? And they don’t like to be seen.”
“Okay, sure,” Corry said. He had looked away from Mr. Nilsson and was now gazing lovingly at the doorknob. Because while he didn’t understand whom Mr. Nilsson was talking about, he was starting to appreciate why the old man had checked into McClaren.
“You need to listen to me,” Mr. Nilsson said, and now his voice was louder, maybe even loud enough to be heard out in the hall.
“All right . . .”
Mr. Nilsson sprang to his feet and put his hand on the door before Corry could open it. “I’m entirely serious, young man! Don’t let them know you can see them. Whatever you do with the rest of your life, you must remember that. This is important.”
“Who . . .” Corry began to say before he realized all the saliva in his mouth had suddenly dried up. He tried again. “Who are they?”
“They’re going to kill me when they find me,” he whispered, gripping Corry’s shoulder tightly. He smelled like sweat and Old Spice. “And they will find me. Because I’ve seen.”
“Let me go, Mr. Nilsson,” Corry said, trying to eradicate the quaver in his voice as much as he could. “Please.”
“Promise me!”
Corry looked into Mr. Nilsson’s face. His teeth were browning on the edges and he had a piece of something green stuck between two of them and his breath smelled like fish. And he was scaring the shit out of Corry. There would be no friendly chats about the Secret Future with this man. He was nuts.
“All right, sure,” Corry said, thinking that agreeing with his captor was probably the best solution. “I promise.”
Mr. Nilsson held onto him for a few more seconds and then let go and stepped aside. “Good,” he said. “That’s a good boy.”
Seizing the chance to leave, Corry grabbed the handle and jerked the door open, got two steps into the hallway . . . and ran right into Ned.
“There you are!” he said. “The hell were you doing?”
“I hadda go to the bathroom,” Corry lied, grabbing his stomach. “Diarrhea. Must’a been the food here or something. Didn’t think you’d mind, my not waiting for you to get back.”
Ned stared at him. “Mr. Parseghian is sitting in his room,” he said. “You wanna tell me what the hell that was about?”
“Is he?” Corry said, trying to keep his voice level. “Could’ve sworn I saw him outside.”
Ned nodded, staring into Corry’s eyes and trying to figure out exactly how much of that story was the truth. Corry stared back, which is what one did when trying to pull off a lie. Ned broke away, glanced at the bathroom door, and tried to see the angles. It didn’t seem possible that Corry would lie about what he saw outside just so that he could go to the bathroom by himself, and as it never occurred to Ned that there might be someone else in there, he couldn’t work it out.
Ned stepped aside and gestured toward the lobby.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s wait for your mother, see what she has to say about all of this, huh?” Like Violet would have any better luck than Ned in detecting when Corry was lying.
Corry walked past the guard without a word, the warning of a crazy man still ringing in his ears.
Don’t let them know you can see them.
As if he didn’t get enough nightmares already.
Chapter Fifteen
Corry didn’t visit McClaren hospital more than a couple of times for the rest of the summer. He told Violet this was because the summer camp had more fun trips than usual, and while this was sort of true, it was also true that the less he saw of Mr. Nilsson, the better.
It was quite a problem for a young man to have to deal with. On the one hand, he’d never met another person who could see things like he could, which was a big deal, especially since that person was so much older than he was. Older people knew a lot about a lot of things. Even crazy old people. Especially crazy old people. And Corry had so many questions he wanted to ask that it kept him up some nights. On the other hand, Mr. Nilsson had turned out to be not just crazy but also creepy and paranoid. Being alone with him in the bathroom for those few minutes in July had driven home the point about Bad Touching that Violet was always trying to make. It wasn’t that Mr. Nilsson had actually touched him in a bad way, but Corry understood now how helpless he would feel should an adult try to do so. He didn’t like that feeling at all.
When he did visit, he stuck to card games with Mr. Pierce. Mr. Nilsson was always there in his chair, but he didn’t try to talk to Corry—secretively or otherwise. Corry, in turn, did not try to talk to him. He did make several attempts to “speak” in the future, like Mr. Nilsson had done, but found it impossible. If he knew he wasn’t going to speak, then he didn’t speak, no matter how much he insisted to himself that he did. It seemed he couldn’t figure out how to fake out the Secret Future.
And now school was about to start again. He had petitioned Violet to let him spend more time at home, even though she preferred he go to McClaren every day and work on his homework there at the beginning of the year to get off on the right foot before the snow came and made it effectively impossible for him to do the work anywhere but at afterschool or at home. His argument was that since he was going into eighth grade, he was only one year away from high school, and in high school he surely would have to be more self-motivated about his homework, so wouldn’t it be a good
idea to practice doing it without help before he got there?
The truth was, by the last week of August, as the Fastest Boy Alive raced down the Trapelo Road hill, he was expecting this to be his final trip to McClaren.
* * *
The first indication that things were a little bit off at the hospital was when Corry found the front gate attendance box empty. Carl wasn’t there. A couple of times in the past he’d found a different guard at the gate, but this time there was no Carl, and nobody else either. Which was too bad because Corry had actually started to follow a little baseball over the summer, so he had something to talk with the guard about.
Corry pedaled on through the gate and rode his bike all the way up to the front door, half expecting that this would cause Carl to magically appear and yell at him for not walking it through the lot. When this also failed to produce the guard, Corry gave up and parked his bike.
The air conditioning greeted him pleasantly as he passed over the threshold into the hospital’s lobby. It had been a hot summer in general, and McClaren was the only place he was welcome that had central air.
“Hi,” he greeted, walking to the reception desk. He couldn’t see anybody there, but as he was only a little over five feet tall that wasn’t all that unusual. Maybe they had just ducked behind the desk. Ned did this bunches of times when playing with the feed for the video monitors.
But nobody sat up at the sound of his voice. He hopped up onto his forearms, leaned over the counter, looked down, and found the desk chair empty. Which was really weird, especially in the greater context: no parking lot guard, no front desk guard.
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