by Lydia Millet
It felt too tense. Plus it was hot, she realized, hot and stuffy; there was sweat beading at her temples and along the edge of her hairline. She forced herself to stand up and moved off again toward the front of the car. There was a rectangular window in the door that looked into the next car up; at least if she stood in the window, she guessed, someone might see her, and then the man couldn’t do anything.
Right?
Through the window, the next car on the train looked empty. She didn’t want to check the back window, because then she’d have to walk past the man again. Acting casual, she sat down on another bench.
Just then—what a relief!—the train made a screeching noise and moved, albeit at a pace that seemed painfully slow. It gained speed. It was way too hot for comfort now, though the heat didn’t feel as oppressive when she knew they were getting somewhere again. Her phone said only two minutes had passed—two minutes that had felt like forever.
When she looked up from it, he was there again. Opposite.
No.
She looked away quickly, touching her ring in a nervous reflex.
Then his mouth was wide open and flames were roaring within. Flames. She jerked back in her seat and banged her head on the wall, her ears ringing. He looked at her without moving, smiling horrifically, and inside his open mouth there were no teeth. No anything. Except fire. It was like roaring flames—bright orange and hard to look at….
She jumped up and ran back along the car to the very end, not stopping even to breathe, and banged on the door—there were some passengers in the car behind, their eyes cast down as they read books or typed on handhelds, but none of them looked up at her as she banged on the window. Not a single one noticed her there, battering her fists against the Plexiglas panel…and somehow she couldn’t say help. The word caught in her throat. There wasn’t enough breath.
Now the train was slowing down—not another delay? Not another dead stop in the blackness of the tunnel? What would she do?
She didn’t turn around—wouldn’t, couldn’t—but then she was looking at the window, the heels of her hands still hitting on it weakly, and instead of the passengers in the next car ignoring her, all she saw was him. Standing behind her with his fiery hole of a mouth.
Flames licked and burned in the empty face.
The doors sprang open. She turned to dash past him—fight her way past him if she had to, she was telling herself—but he was gone.
Everyday people were streaming in.
She ran up the many steps, half afraid the man with fire in his mouth was pursuing her, though she didn’t exactly feel his presence anymore. Then she was out of the T station, trembling, a sensation of pinpricks on her cheeks and upper arms. She was relieved to be in the fresh, cold air.
Anyway, he was gone, right? He was gone now.
She leaned against a planter on the sidewalk beneath some big trees with dead leaves and tried to slow down her fast breathing. There was a subway map in a big plastic frame nearby, sticking out of the sidewalk; there were trash cans in casings of what looked like nubbly pebbles. It was gray and bleak around here. A few people walked past, but none of them was him.
He was gone.
She pulled out her phone—her heartbeat was still rapid, but she had to do something to occupy her while she calmed down—and brought up the street map with the Institute and the Kendall Square station on it. She had about three blocks to walk; it wasn’t complicated. But the Institute itself, Jax had said, was in a building without a name on it, so all she had was numbers: a street address, a floor number, a room number. The kids shared rooms, Jax had said, and there would be a guard at the front desk, and if anyone tried to stop her she was supposed to duck into a stairwell and text him.
No new messages.… Should she call him?
She should check in with Hayley; it had been twenty-four minutes since she left the pool. She texted as she walked, asking if Mrs. M had noticed her absence. Not that it would change anything. Just that she might as well know.
NOPE J, wrote Hayley.
So she dialed Jax next, still jangling with adrenalin from the memory of those dancing flames in the hole of that mouth…. Could it have been the nazar? Was it just the ring that had made her see that?
Maybe the flames hadn’t been real at all—a hallucination, a vision about who the guy was. She’d only seen them when she reached down and touched the ring. Before that he’d been just a man, staring. Yes, maybe the ring had put that picture in her head. And the flaming mouth hadn’t been real at all.
It was a relief to think so.
On the other end, as she held the phone to her ear and walked, Jax’s phone rang and rang and went to voice mail.
The building’s number was above its revolving doors in blocky, modern letters. She went into a high-ceilinged lobby with a bright white floor; a fattish security guard sat behind a high counter.
She heard the squeak of her sneakers again as she crossed the linoleum toward him. She was still on edge from what had happened in the T; it made her self-conscious.
“Hi, uh, I’m here to visit someone on the eighth floor? At the Institute for Advancement?” she said.
Jax had said tell no one—did that include this guy? And tell no one what, anyway? That she was coming to get him? Was she supposed to be sneaking in? But how could she?
No, she thought, he couldn’t have meant that.
Anyway the guard barely paid any attention, just waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the elevators and turned a page in his magazine, so she walked past him and pushed the button.
Even on the eighth floor, where the Institute housed its teachers and students, there wasn’t much to trumpet what it was. When the elevator doors slid open, all there was to tell her she’d come to the right place was a small plastic sign on the wall. I.A. STES 800-898.
Jax’s room was supposed to be 822. She walked along the corridor, watching the numbers on the doors rise.
“Why! If it isn’t Cara Sykes!” said a man’s voice behind her.
She spun around and saw one of the doors was open; an older guy stood there. He had a salt-and-pepper goatee and wore a suit and a beige winter coat.
“Remember me? I work with your mother!” he said. “Roger!”
“Oh, right,” said Cara, relieved.
Roger was another marine biologist who did research with her mother at Woods Hole; he studied the ocean, like her mother, and was also a professor. He was her mother’s boss, basically, though he never acted bossy.
“But what are you doing here?” she asked, and then hoped it didn’t seem too rude.
“Oh, I consult,” he said. “You know—come in and out, work on a project here and there. I was the one who first told your mother about the Institute’s gifted-kid program.”
“Oh,” said Cara, and nodded.
“You come to see your little brother?” he asked.
“Yeah, I missed him,” she said, and smiled casually, she hoped, to indicate it was a routine visit.
“Oh, hey,” said Roger, like a light bulb had come on in his head, and reached into a coat pocket. “Would you give him this? It’s just a souvenir pen, but he left it in your mother’s office a while ago and I happened to notice it there as I was leaving for the city this morning.”
It was a cheesy ballpoint pen from the Aquarium, with a big orca bobblehead on the end.
“Uh, sure,” said Cara, and took it.
Random, she thought. But whatever. Maybe Roger was trying to reach out because he was sorry for them. She didn’t think he had kids of his own; he might just be clueless.
“I’ll let you get to your visit, then,” he said, and patted her shoulder lightly before he ducked down the hall and hit the elevator button. She turned and kept walking down the narrow hall along the row of doors. 814, 816.
He must have gotten tired of waiting for the elevator, because when Cara looked over her shoulder to wave goodbye, she hadn’t heard the elevators ding but he was gone anyway: sh
e heard the EXIT door to the stairs click shut.
“Jax?” she said, standing at the door marked 822. She knocked.
The door wasn’t locked or even closed all the way; it pushed open on her second knock.
“Jax?” she called more loudly as she stepped in.
There was a wooden bunk bed with colorful quilts on it, a round, warm-yellow throw rug, and two computer setups at desks against the opposite wall; the room was wallpapered especially for geeks, with E=MC2 and other equations printed on it.
She didn’t see any geeks around, though.
She could sit down and wait for him, she guessed. She sat down on the bottom bunk. Although…
She flipped the bobblehead pen onto the bedspread beside her and lifted her phone. Forty-three minutes, now, since she’d snuck away from the pool. Still: Hayley or Jaye would text her if there was a problem.
“Cara!” came a hiss from beneath her. She jumped. “Close the door!”
She walked over and closed it. Then Jax’s blond head and hands, covered in cobwebs, were sticking out from beneath the bed.
“What are you doing, Jax?” she squeaked as he crawled all the way out onto the rug.
“Hiding,” said Jax. “Clearly.”
He rubbed a cobweb off an eyelid.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I heard you coming, and I thought you could be one of them.”
“One of who?”
“I don’t know. I told you. I can’t read anyone here. I’m not used to it! How do you go around all the time not knowing what’s going on in people’s heads?”
He looked off-balance to Cara, on edge in a way she wasn’t used to.
“Jax. Welcome to the human race. It’s going to be OK.”
She reached out and clasped his arm, and slowly he crept up onto the bed and sat beside her. She slung an arm around his shoulders.
“It’s OK, Jax. Really.”
“I found the source she found, and now they’re after me. I know it,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “You have to get me out of here.”
“The source?”
“It’s over there,” he said, pointing. “On my laptop.”
“The source?”
“The data! About the source. I’ll show you at home. But now can we go?”
“Get your stuff, then,” said Cara. “Explain it to me later. But Jax, there’s something—on my way over here I thought I saw—”
“We have to sneak out,” interrupted Jax, not listening. “They can’t let me go without a parent present.”
“Well—geez, Jax!” she burst out, impatient. “Why didn’t you just call Dad, then?”
Forty-seven minutes, said the timer on her phone. And nothing seemed dangerous in this place; so far the best word to describe it was boring. Dangerous was out there, if it was anywhere. If the man with the flames had been real. Jax was overreacting. And instead of just calling their dad, who could come and pick him up without any stress at all in an actual car, he’d made her stage a prison break and then jump through all these hoops.
Because even assuming it was the ring that had made her see flames—and even if, say, the flames were a vision and therefore more a symbol for something than real fire—a guy following her around an otherwise empty subway car had been deeply creepy. Plus she’d probably catch some serious flak when she and Jax got back, unless it was in the next half hour or so and the whole thing passed without notice. (Mrs. M, unlike Cara’s own parents, was into grounding.) She could even be kicked off the team for this. There were strict rules about how you had to act when you went to meets.
And then there was the issue of what to do with Jax now that she had him. Maybe she could still get back before Mrs. M knew she was gone; maybe she could just explain that Jax had missed his family and showed up. Maybe they’d call her dad and it would turn out fine; they’d simply take Jax home with them. There were a bunch of empty seats in the bus, after all.
“Ow! What’s that?” squeaked Jax. He felt beneath his leg on the quilt, pulling out the bobblehead pen. “This thing scratched me. Right through my pants!”
“Oh, sorry—Roger gave it to me to give to you,” said Cara. “You know. Roger who works with Mom at the—”
She was about to go on when there was a sharp rap on the room door and someone pushed it open without even waiting for a Come in.
“Jackson?”
It was a tall, thin woman with an Afro and a foreign accent—she must be one of the teachers—and she looked almost angry.
Was she one of the ones Jax said he couldn’t trust?
“Jax, you’re supposed to be in session,” said the teacher sternly.
Her gaze flicked to Cara, but then she and Cara were both looking at Jax. His eyes were odd—almost milky. Almost cloudy.
Cara hadn’t noticed it before.
“Mrs. Omotoso, I don’t feel so good,” he said slowly.
And Cara could see it was true.
Mrs. Omotoso crossed the room quickly and put her slender hand over his forehead.
“Cara, we need to move him right away,” she said. “To the infirmary.”
It wasn’t till later that Cara realized that, at that particular moment, she hadn’t yet told the teacher who she was.
Three
By the time more of them came to get Jax, his eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. His skin was pale in a way that scared Cara.
Two men slid him off the bed and onto the gurney, a slim, sheet-covered cot with wheels that rattled loudly. Then they were headed out of the room and other adults were converging on them. Cara practically had to jog to keep up.
She hustled alongside the gurney as Mrs. Omotoso and the men—other teachers, she guessed—pushed it quickly down the corridor; kids popped their heads out of doors to watch the hurrying crowd pass by. At the end of the hallway the group turned and went into a small elevator, angling the gurney in through the narrow door and squeezing in around it, pressed up against each other and the walls; but just a few moments after it had dinged closed, the elevator door slid open again and the crowd was squeezing out, Cara tripping and righting herself in their wake.
And in an instant the Institute seemed like a whole different place—dimmer, older, softer. In here the corridors were more like tunnels than halls; she thought of the back stairways of medieval castles seen in movies. It was incredible that this ancient-seeming place was part of the generic office building: there was dark wood everywhere, shadowy corners and niches, ornate light fittings on the walls instead of fluorescent tubes on the ceilings. Barely lit alcoves housed statues, large amber-tinted oil paintings, and faded tapestries hung on the walls.
“Where are we?” asked Cara, but she was still being rushed along as the teachers concentrated on Jax, whose small, skinny body jiggled inertly as the gurney bumped over the well-worn planks of the floor.
Now the place reminded her of a musty, half-neglected museum, she was thinking as she kept up with them. Set into the walls were endless rows and towers of shelves and cabinets lined with artifacts whose nature she couldn’t quite discern…. She tried to hear what the teachers were saying, trying to figure out why exactly they thought they should take Jax deeper into this nameless building instead of calling an ambulance.
Trying to figure out if she should be afraid.
So far the teachers were ignoring her. Jax hadn’t trusted them—she wasn’t forgetting that. She couldn’t. On the other hand, they just didn’t feel that sinister. The man on the subway had been sinister, but these people didn’t have that vibe. And they had to care enough about Jax to be so serious and preoccupied. Didn’t they?
She wondered if the way she felt about things was the truth of them, whether instincts could be trusted more than the reasons you might think of—the reasons why the instincts might be wrong.
Her eyes lit on objects peeking out of wall niches, looming down from high shelves—a series of porous rocks and minerals, one of which bore
the curling, weathered label POMPEII; glass cases of fossils and bones; a fancy gold pocket watch with Roman numerals; what looked like parts of antique machines she couldn’t identify, convoluted and graceful with spirals and tubes and wheels of discolored, dented brass; and a peeling, faded old painting of a smiling, proper-looking gentleman in a black bowler hat leaning on a walking stick in a leafy, sunlit garden. That picture looked genteel, until she noticed there was a long and hairy tail curling down onto the ground behind him.
They turned another corner. The gurney pushed through a set of heavy drapes, and she followed, silky tassels brushing over her forehead and eyes.
The room behind the velvet drapes was only slightly less dim and musty than the wood-paneled, winding hallways that had led them into it.
What made it different was its airiness, topped by a high, domed ceiling painted with what reminded her—though it was too far above to be seen exactly—of slides she’d seen of the Sistine Chapel. Far beneath the dome, through which a silvery light filtered, was a raised platform. The teachers trundled the gurney around to the side of the platform and lifted Jax on; then they bent over him, talking, and Cara couldn’t understand them.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked urgently as soon as there was a small lull in the burble of conversation.
“Poison,” said Mrs. Omotoso over her shoulder.
“Poison?” cried Cara, her voice shrill.
“Sit down, dear. I know it’s difficult. Be patient. Your brother’s in good hands.”
“Poison?” repeated Cara. “But then—but you’re not doctors! Are you? So shouldn’t we—we should call 911!”
“No,” said Mrs. Omotoso, and turned back to Jax again. “Believe me. Doctors and hospitals can’t help him. It’s not that kind of poison.”
One of the other teachers was rolling over a cabinet on wheels, whose shallow trays clicked open. Around Jax, who was hidden from her behind the wall of people, it slowly got brighter, a dimmer switch being turned up.