and crept forward to see what had so amazed Deke.
As long as she kept between Deke and the door, she would be okay. And maybe she would learn something about the basement that would help her go AWOL during the night. A side door, a hidden set of stairs, information she could tuck away for future reference. Or maybe she'd discover some killer celebrity weight-loss secrets.
She followed Deke, and the glow became bright enough that she could see the shiny cables and lines running overhead. The basement broke into several corridors, and Deke headed toward the middle of the building. Vicky followed figuring they must be beneath Room Thirteen and Dr. Kracowski's lab.
'Hey, you,' Deke shouted. Vicky thought he was calling her at first, but then a shadow separated itself from the larger darkness. Vicky couldn't tell if it was a woman or a man. In fact, it seemed sexless, a shape that was only faintly suggestive of a human. It slipped down the main corridor, away from the light.
Deke followed it. 'Come back here, Queenie.'
Vicky knelt behind a row of tall cylindrical tanks. She pressed her hand against one. It was frigid to the touch. Above her, wires crisscrossed in a pattern that seemed an elaborate design, a technological spiderweb.
Deke's voice came from deep within the corridor, followed by his muffled echo. 'Hey, you can't hide from me, barf-brains.'
Vicky crept to the mouth of the corridor. Though the glow from the open room carried only a few dozen feet down the corridor, Vicky could make out rows of metal doors lining each wall. Keeping low in case Deke happened to look back, she moved to the first door on her right.
The door had a little window set at head level. The window was glass with wire reinforcement. Behind the glass was a metal grid, as if to protect the glass from being broken from the inside. Like a meat locker where the cows were still alive and plenty pissed off.
She raised on her tiptoes and peered in. A pale face stared back at her through the window. Then she realized it was her own reflection, doubled by me two panes of glass. God, were her cheeks really that chubby? She exhaled slowly, then took a long breath of the stale basement air.
Silly fatso. Bad enough to be chased by a pervert and to sneak around in the dark, but you have to go and start seeing ghosts again.
'Come get some Deke love,' Deke yelled from the darkness far down the corridor. If he were any louder, the counselors might hear him through the floor. Vicky didn't want to be caught because of Deke's stupidity. If the other kids found out she and Deke were together in the basement, they'd be making crude remarks until the end of time. She should get out, but first she wanted to see the room-She pulled open the door. The room resembled a cell, small and square and windowless. Enough of the blue glow leaked in that she could make out the walls. They had an odd texture, though they were blotched with mold and stains. She went inside, listening for Deke, and put her hand on the nearest wall. It was soft.
Quilted with padded canvas.
A rubber room.
She backed out, ice water rushing through her veins. Down the corridor were more of the rooms. How many people had been penned up down here, their shouts soaking into the walls, their prayers bouncing off the metal bars, their dreams swallowed by the cold stones that enclosed Wendover's foundation?
How many?
Deke screamed in the far darkness, and Vicky staggered toward the glowing generators and the metal cylinders, then past them to the door and outside. She swallowed a mouthful of the night air and had never been so grateful to see the stars. When her heart slowed enough for her to breathe, she crept up the stairs and traced her steps back to the Green Room, Deke's scream resounding in her ears.
NINETEEN
'You don't believe me,' Freeman said, fidgeting in his chair, annoyed as always when some shrink wanted to do a vampire number on his soul.
Starlene Rogers sat across from him wearing a UNC Tar Heel sweatshirt and dark slacks, legs folded under her as if she had settled in for a long yoga session. 'I believe you, unless you're lying.'
She'd brought him to Four, one of the little rooms, the one-on-one places that were all the same once you cut to the chase: a place for you to squirm and lie and try to forget while some know-it-all hammered your feelings out of you.
But Freeman was Eastwood-tough, his skin was leather, his attitude was by-God bulletproof. Method acting at its finest. Who cared if Miss Starlene tried her little touchy-feely tricks? Freeman could wait it out. He'd shrunk a dozen shrinks, outlasted some real pros in the past, and he'd survived some real sons-of-bitches. Dad, for instance, the ultimate troll under the bridge.
The secret was in knowing how to tuck it away, tiptoe from thought to thought, to dream only in the safety of night. Or to just come right out and blow their little minds.
'I'm not lying,' he said. 'I can hear inside people's heads. I know what they're thinking, at least sometimes. And I've learned that most people are pretty damned dumb. All they think about are TV shows and money and getting other people to do things for them.'
'Freeman, you're aware of your manic and depressive cycle. Mania can cause people to believe they have superhuman powers.'
'It's real. It's one of those things you just know.'
Starlene leaned forward, one of those trained gestures that meant she was pretending to care. Next she would probably touch his knee. 'But there's no definitive scientific proof of extrasensory perception.'
'Doesn't Kracowski let you in on his little card games? Maybe you ought to ask your friend Randy about it.'
'What's Randy got to do with it?'
'He ever mention the Trust to you?'
'The Trust?'
'Never mind. You're better off not knowing.'
'I can't help you unless you open up to me,' she said. 'That's the only trust I know about.'
'See, I knew you were going to say that. You're just like all the others. You can't see that I'm different. I don't deserve to be locked away here with a bunch of losers.'
'Do you think Vicky is a loser?'
Freeman watched the way Starlene's eyes fixed on her notes, like she was afraid to look at him. They were all afraid when he was like this. They should be afraid. Because he would triptrap into their sad little minds and play games. He would see right through them, scramble their memories, make them pay, he would 'Freeman. Please sit down.'
Freeman blinked. He was near the door. He didn't even remember standing up. He walked back to his chair.
'Is Vicky a loser?' Starlene wrote something on her pad.
'She's okay.'
'For a girl, you mean?'
'Now, don't you start in on that, too. I get enough of it from her.'
'I saw you and her by the lake yesterday.'
'We were just talking.'
'Talking.'
'Yeah.' He debated launching into a patented Pacino rant, a cinematic soliloquy that enumerated the miserable, pathetic failings of God and the universe. 'We were talking about reading each other's minds. And I know what you're going to say, you're wondering why we needed to speak if we could read minds.'
'No, I wasn't going to say that.'
'What were you going to say, then?'
Starlene tucked her pen and paper into the macrame purse beside her chair. She sat back, folded her arms, and closed her eyes. 'Tell me.'
