The Fall of Never(99)

Carlos backed away from the bed. He was visibly shaken, his hands trembling so much he shoved them into the pockets of his pants. Nothing made sense.

“Don’t be afraid,” she repeated.

He shook his head.

“Whatever danger Kelly is in, it has to do with her own mind, her own hidden book. I feel her searching for something—some memory—but it continues to elude her…and me. I feel that once she finds it, it will open all the floodgates. I’ve been keeping a strong lock on her. When she finally remembers, then I will understand too.”

“How can you help her?” His throat was dry and abrasive. “What could you possibly do?”

“When the time comes, I can reach for her, pull her, make a grab for her. The mind is a powerful thing, Carlito. More powerful than most of us know. Maybe, if we’re careful, there will be a way for us to pull her from this danger.”

“But we don’t even know what the danger is.”

“Soon,” she said. Something in her voice sounded off, as if half her thoughts were occupied by something else. “When she remembers, I will know. I’m there inside her mind, but her mind is thick with smoke, her memories hard to see. The moment she remembers and the smoke clears, I will be able to see. Then it will be time.”

Carlos backed up against the wall. Resting his head against the wall, he peered through the crack between the drawn curtain and the window at the glitter of city lights below. It occurred to him then that he had been a very different person just one short month ago.

Nellie’s voice floated across the room to him: “You are thinking of your son.”

“I am.”

“I feel there may be some connection between Kelly and your son, that the two events are somehow linked. It is too hazy to tell for certain; it is just a feeling I have…”

“I don’t believe that,” he said, not knowing exactly what he believed. “You don’t need to say it to get me to help you.”

“That’s not why I say it.”

“I still don’t believe it.”

“But you will help us?”

Carlos closed his eyes. He could feel the room throbbing all around him. It was as if he were standing in the heart of some great beast—and perhaps he was, in a way. Standing in the center of this vital, life-breathing organ. Or perhaps he was the organ himself.

We’re all a part of the same monster, he thought.

“I’ll help,” he said.





Part Three

The (Hidden) Book of Thaw





Chapter Twenty-Two


In many ways, the Coopersville Female Institution was very much like the Kellow Compound itself. Constructed in the wake of the Second World War, when it was simply referred to as Coopersville, the immense brick-and-mortar facility’s primary objective had been to accommodate the large influx of injured war veterans from New York State. Later, in the midsixties, and after a lengthy and strenuous renovation, the facility reopened as a hospital for young women suffering from psychological aberrations. The building rested atop a massive wreath of aggregate rock, shouldered on three of its four sides by the sprawling wishbone-shaped Champlain Forest. A squat, three-story building with limited windows (all of which were laid with pebbled, wire-meshed panes), the institute hunkered close to the earth like a crouching beast above the skyline of the feeble and hapless city below. The sheer authority of the building was reminiscent of Kelly’s childhood home: upon her initial arrival all those years ago, the building’s wealth, frigidity, and isolation created in Kelly a warped sense of belonging.

The bizarre death of the two young girls on the third floor was not the only black cloud hanging over the history of the institution. A number of tragedies occurred throughout the passage of years, most notably the electrical fire in 1982 that caused sufficient damage to most of the third floor. At that time, the third floor had served as an invalid ward, catering to the bedridden and physically inept. And due to the failed conditions of these patients, several were unable to be removed from the building in time. The number of deaths was disastrously high. And despite major reconstruction to the floor soon after the fire, the third floor of the Coopersville Female Institution remained closed. These stories were known by many to be legends and ghost stories, monsters in the proverbial closet; they were known to few others as the truth.

Now, all these years later, Kelly maneuvered her father’s Cadillac up the paved incline that led to the institution’s front entrance. She braked the car as it cut through a clearing in the trees, enabling her to view the building in all its monstrous grandeur. She stared at it for a long time, suddenly deaf to the car radio humming softly from the dash, and was somewhat surprised at her own lack of emotion. She’d spent three years of her life inside the walls of the institution, caged and numbered, while her mind worked on suppressing the memory of the very evil that had forced her into such a place. Yet looking at it now, she felt only a sinking dullness at the core of her being, too distant and meaningless to rile her.

She continued up the driveway and pulled around to the side parking lot where she docked the Cadillac in a visitor’s spot.

Inside, she found herself frozen in the doorway of the front hall. All the emotions that had thus far eluded her now slammed home all at once. Her sense of function evaporated into nothingness. Her legs went weak and her bladder suddenly blossomed into a well of bursting agony. Before her eyes, the hallways appeared to cant to one side, to shift positions in an attempt to throw her off balance. After all this time, nothing had changed. The cinderblock walls were still painted in the same industrial flavors; the carpet beneath her feet remained the color of iodine, the texture of Velcro; the light fixtures in the ceiling still buzzed and hummed and spat with a persistence as deliberate as human personality.