“What?”
“My uncle. I want to call him. I’m a minor, and I don’t have to talk to you.”
“Mr. Lund, you’re not in any trouble here, so long as you cooperate –”
“He’s a lawyer, and I want to call him,” I said, despite being uncertain if the statement was true. “Now.”
He scratched anxiously at the back of his head, but then gave a stiff nod.
“I ... all right. That’s ... that’s fine. You can call your uncle; of course.”
He stood to go to the door and said something to his colleague before leading me from the room. A myriad of gazes followed me from the surrounding rooms as I went, but the walk to the stairwell seemed more solitary than ever. As we walked to the ground floor and crossed the campus, I suddenly thought of Dictionary. I wasn’t sure what they would do with her upon discovering her; I should have taken her and buried her someplace safe out of the snow.
“Here.”
He handed me the phone in the main office and I punched in Karl’s number with lead-like fingers. It took me several tries to get it right; my mind was so fogged that I could barely remember the area code.
“Hello?”
His voice came over the line crisply and shook me slightly from my haze. As I opened my mouth to speak to him, the overwhelming realization of what had happened came over me all at once, and my face broke into a painful grimace as I tried to coax the words from my throat. The administrator watched on from the corner of the room.
“Karl, I –”
“Enim?” His tone altered as he asked, and he seemed to strain to hear what the unfamiliar note in my own was. “Are you – what’s wrong?”
“Karl, I – I need you to come get me.”
“What?”
“Come get me. Please.”
“What’s happened? Why?”
There was no way that I could say it: the words were sharp against my chest, and if they moved to come to my mouth they would surely cut my throat open on the way. I struggled to find an excuse to give to him, but my mouth only quivered as I thought of all that had happened and I repeated the phrase again and again.
“Come get me. Please. Please, just come get me.”
“Enim, alright – don’t worry. I’ll ... I’ll come get you. But ... what’s wrong?”
I shook my head even though he couldn’t see me, and he breathed a worried sigh that came over the line as static.
“Enim, are you alright? Is it ... Is there someone there with you?”
“No.”
“No one’s there?”
“No – just come get me, Karl. Please.”
“I’ll come and get you, Enim, don’t worry. I just need to know that you’ll be alright,” he said, and the worry in his voice wasn’t hidden inside the forced-calm of his tone. “You don’t sound well. I need to know that there’s someone with you.”
“There’s – there’s no one.”
“What about Jack? Is he there with you?”
My voice caught and I pushed the phone to the administrator so that I could hide my face behind my hands. He took it and put it to his ear, but the half-conversation was barely noticeable because of the burning in my throat and the throbbing in my ears.
“Hello? Yes, I’m with him ... No, there’s been a situation of sorts, I ... I see. No, I didn’t realize, I just thought ... I see. Yes, I can do that. I ... Alright. I’ll make sure of it. Yes, I understand ...”
He hung up a moment later and wordlessly indicated for me to follow him. We crossed through the snow to the Health Center and he led me inside with a firm grip on one of my shoulders. After saying something lowly to one of the nurses, she brought me in to sit upon one of the white-lined cots in the side room. As her eyes traveled over my clenched white hands and wrecked expression, her face fell into a frown. She stared at me for a moment before retreating from the room. In the silence that followed her dying footsteps, I let my head drop to my hands. The white room felt like a prison, and the campus had never felt so empty.
I shut my eyes. Everything was ruined. If only Jack and I had left the island months ago, then we wouldn’t have ever gotten involved with Miss Mercier and the dead girls’ deaths, and I wouldn’t have had to sit with my mother’s death and the tormenting song and thoughts that had taken her place. We could have been someplace warm and covered over with the soft glow of the sun, not sunken beneath cold snow and down-poured with rain and sleet.
I tried to keep myself focused, but my mind couldn’t begin to make up where it should settle. Jack would be rowing across the ocean at that very moment while the police began to search the island for him. As I pictured him somewhere out in the blue, I had the urge to jump down from the cot and run after him before he got away, certain that it had been a mistake to let him go. But even if I made it to the shore in record time, he would never see me flailing my arms from so far away.
And the world was ending. I could feel it closing in, could feel the dark, dense, dead sky sinking down and weighing down the ceiling until it broke and collapsed atop of me. I could feel it pressing against me and breaking every bone inside, liquefying the muscles and squeezing the blood from the flesh, and yet I hadn’t died. I was just the same as ever: unfeeling, unmoving, undead. And if I could have just put it all back together – to rip the world apart and rearrange it so that it was right again – then everything would be alright again. Then Jack wouldn’t be there, and I wouldn’t be here, and everything could be fine again.
And I thought, for the most fleeting of moments, that if the world had turned on me, then perhaps it would also consent to turn back around as well. I thought that maybe I would wake up and the time would have reversed itself, or that I would be allowed a second chance to redo things. I pulled myself back to the moment when my mother had turned to walk through the door, but this time I reached out and grabbed her before she went to the snow-covered bridge. And when my head shook with the rationality that that couldn’t be, the image was marred by the one of Jack standing by the dorm room door, and I reached out to grab him instead –
I hunched forward on the cot and teetered on the edge of the thin mattress, staring at the floor intently until the image broke, and squeezed my skull between my hands. I wanted it to make sense again, because it wasn’t supposed to be like this: it was supposed to add up. I felt as though I was trapped in the final act in the opera, the part when everything beautiful and rich and meaningful to be said had been expressed, and now there was nothing else to say or be done that was worthwhile to watch unfold. I had waited all that time to realize that there was no meaning at all; I had been running and running only to find that I had run out of places to go.
The curtain that served as a door to the room rustled slightly before opening. A shadow fell over the side of the bed and laid across me in a patch of cold darkness.
“Enim?”
Beringer maneuvered through the tight space to get over to me. Snow that still clung to his feet trickled to the floor and pooled around his ruined shoes. I stared at the flood with empty eyes and wished that it would rise to drown me.
“Enim – are you all right?”
He was standing close to me though his voice was far away. A thousand things had happened since I had last seen him, but I was quite unable to make a sound.
“Your uncle called me and asked me to come,” he said, stepping closer. “He said that you were upset; he didn’t want you to be alone.”
I shut my eyes again to block out the harsh fluorescent lights overhead, but the bright blue-white still pierced through the lids at my eyes. It occurred to me that Karl had assumed I was upset about my mother, and had sent Beringer to stay with me until he could get there. I stayed silent for a long while, wishing that the cold would leave the room to make room for the things that needed to be said.
His bare hands clutched at the counter as he waited for me to speak. He was poorly dressed for the weather: he must have run out in too much of a hurry to collect up his s
carf and gloves. It reminded me far too much of how Miss Mercier had run out of her house without her shoes to give Jack his keys back, and of how my mother, too, had left without bothering to put something proper on. Perhaps they all knew that it was the end of something unseen, and the trivialities of life were no longer of any concern.
“Enim, can you tell me what’s wrong?”
And though I could feel that everything was coming to a close, too, it didn’t feel as though it was the end. I pressed my head further into my hands as I realized that I was being cheated out of a proper finale in the same way that I had been with Turandot. The part of the story with me in it was over despite it not being finished, and I would never know the answer to the riddle. Someone else would write an unfitting ending in an attempt to tie up the loose ends of Miss Mercier’s murder.
“Everything. Everything’s wrong.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because now everyone knows, but they’ve got it all wrong.”
“What have they got wrong?” Beringer asked, frowning down at me in concern.
“They think ... they think that Jack ...” I shook my head until the words would come. “They think he killed Miss Mercier.”
Beringer’s head moved to the side strangely as though the statement had bypassed his ears, questioning the reason he had been summoned to my side.
“Jack did what?”
“He didn’t do anything,” I said forcefully. As Beringer raised his eyebrows, I slid to the edge of the cot and corrected my tone. “He – Jack and I – we found something out after Miss Mercier died about something on the island, only we didn’t tell anyone, and now he’s in trouble, and everyone thinks he killed her, and –”
“Enim, Enim: wait. What’s this about? Karl said you were upset about your mother –”
“I’m not. I am – but that’s not why I called. I –” It was clear that I was making no sense to him, but he strained to understand. I gripped the edge of the cot as I forced myself to speak rationally. “Dr. Beringer, if I tell you something and swear that it’s the truth, will ... will you believe me?”
He righted his head so that he was looking straight at me, and his expression alone would have answered the question fully enough.
“Of course I will, Enim.”
And at last the words spilled from me without hesitation: I told him about how Jack’s desire to find Miss Mercier’s killer had led us to her house where we had found the list of names, and how they corresponded to girls on the island who had seemingly run away from home never to be seen again; and I told him about how we had assumed it was Barker, and of how I had hit Julian just to be sent to his office so that I could steal the file, and of what was inside that solidified our suspicions; and I told him about the girl who had gone missing after Barker’s heart-attack, and of how we realized that the killer must have a knowledge of science, and of how close we had been to finding the answer when everything had been ruined.
I told him even though I knew it sounded ridiculous, and he listened without laughing or making any snide comments about the childishness of our actions. He looked at me raptly as though he had never been more serious in his life, but given how ridiculous the entirety of the story sounded, I wondered if his expression was hiding pity.
“Do you ... do you think I’m crazy, Dr. Beringer?”
He looked at me closely for a moment before giving the softest of smiles.
“No, Enim, I don’t. In fact I’m ... I’m rather impressed, really, that you and Jack managed to figure all of that out.”
“Really?” My heart twitched mid-beat. “So – so you believe me then? You’ll tell everyone that it wasn’t Jack?”
He adjusted his stance so that he could lean up against the counter. Crossing his arms behind his back, he gave a thoughtful expression before responding.
“Do you two still have the list of names?”
“I – yeah. It’s up in the dorm room ... somewhere.”
“And all this information on the girls is there, too?”
“Yeah. It’s mainly pictures and whatnot ... there’s nothing too specific. We only just figured out the last part.”
Beringer nodded.
“The last part,” he repeated quietly to himself. “And ... how did you figure out the last part?”
I turned my head slightly as I regarded him. Despite my elation that he believed me, a damp cold was creeping over my skin.
“I ... I don’t know. We just sort of ... put it all together, I guess.”
He nodded slowly.
“And what do you know about the ... killer ... again?” he asked. His hands slid on the edge of the desk as though readying to straighten and leave. “You thought he might be a science teacher?”
“Right.” I glanced away from him as I spoke. His intent stare was beginning to become disconcerting, and the air in the room seemed to have tightened. “Because he’s young, and he takes summers off, and he’s scientific enough to know how to dismember someone ...”
Beringer was still nodding, but as he continued to look at me, his face was an expression that I didn’t recognize. I chewed the side of my mouth at the fear that he would think that everything I had said was an insane concoction of lies that I had strung together to cover up my friend’s wrongdoings.
“You ... you do believe me, don’t you, Dr. Beringer?” I said quietly.
“Of course I believe you, Enim. I know you didn’t kill anyone. I know that Jack didn’t, either.”
As I let out a breath, he straightened and stepped closer to me.
“Your uncle was very upset when he called me, Enim,” he said seriously. “Nearly frantic, actually. He wanted me to get here as soon as I could. He was afraid that you might harm yourself.”
“I know. I’m sorry to’ve bothered you – I thought that someone would tell him I was upset over Jack. I didn’t think he’d call you.”
Beringer slid his hands into his pockets and surveyed me.
“No, no, that’s alright. I’m glad he did.”
His face twitched on the last word as though he was going to smile, and the slight alteration in his features flashed to a face quite unlike the one that I knew. I raised my chin very slightly as I stared up at him, and my fingers clenched the thin sheets on the cot as my mind slowed and repeated the words that I had just said aloud moments before: the killer was someone young, who took summers off, and who had a firm knowledge of science ...
“Right,” I said quietly.
He smiled again, a short, terse smile that didn’t touch his eyes, and his frozen face had never looked so unfamiliar.
“Of course it is.”
“I ... you ...”
“Tell me, Enim, what exactly did you and Jack have written down about this murderer?” he asked softly, taking another step forward towards me.
“I ... it was ... it was mainly newspaper clippings,” I said. “And ... and photos and stuff. I mean, we ... we didn’t really write much down ...”
“No? Are you certain about that?”
I shook my head, no longer able to speak, and dropped my eyes to the floor. My chest refused to rise and fall as I put it all together: the girls had all been reported missing on Fridays, and Miss Mercier had been killed late Thursday night or early Friday morning. The killings had been going on for a year and only paused during the summertime. The killer was intelligent enough to pass off the disappearances as unhappy teenagers who had run away from home, and knowledgeable of science and knew how to disarticulate a body ...
“Enim ...”
All that time that Jack and I had wasted looking for someone who worked at Bickerby, and the killer hadn’t resided on the island at all: Beringer came to the island on Thursdays and stayed into Friday; he came during the school year but stopped for the summer holidays; he was a doctor and knew how to dismember a human body ...
“...why don’t we take a walk?”
“I ...”
I glanced at the curtain shuttin
g the room off from the rest of the Health Center, willing the nurse to come back and check on me to see if there was anything that I needed, but no movement came from behind the curtain.
“Eight o’clock,” Beringer whispered. “Her shift’s over.”
“But ...”
I looked at Beringer’s unrecognizable face again and didn’t believe what my mind was telling me was true. It couldn’t be him: he was the one person that had gone out of his way to help me, and to treat me like a person rather than some warped, unstable creature. He had cared about me and understood me when I didn’t do the same for myself. He couldn’t have been a killer – I trusted him.
He leaned down to look at me straight in the face.
“Believe me when I say, Enim, that I truly wish you hadn’t found out about this.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but only a hollow noise escaped from within me; there was nothing that I could say that would express what was spearing through my skull.
“I ... but you ...” My voice and mind were running parallel to one another, forming and being spoken separately. “You killed those girls? You – you killed Miss Mercier? But – why?”
Beringer contemplated me sadly. The golden flecks in his irises had faded to brown, and the artificial light reflected in his pupils.
“I had hoped that you, of all people, would understand.”
“Understand what?” I breathed. “Killing?”
“No.” He shut his eyes quickly against the word. “Understand what it’s like – to be different.”
He straightened and pulled his collar up to shield his neck in lieu of a scarf and motioned for me to stand as well. My legs locked as I did so, leaden and dead beneath me. I stared up at Beringer, shaking violently in the deep cold in the room, and silently begged myself to wake up from what must have been the worst yet of my dreams.
“What are you ... what are you going to do?”
“We’re going to take a little walk,” he said simply.
“I ... Are you going to kill me?”
Beringer exhaled through his nose in the remnants of a chuckle. The smile was still playing softly on his face as he shook his head, and for a moment I felt relieved, as though I had been completely mistaken and that he was not the killer, and that this was all really a misunderstanding that I still couldn’t quite grasp –
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 35