314 Book 2 (Widowsfield Trilogy) Page 24

  “You’re the only one here I’m a hundred percent sure is a murderer. Why should I trust you?”

  Oliver was about to offer a retort, but stopped and sighed before nodding. “Fine, fine. I don’t have time to argue with you. But just remember who has the gun here. Okay? Don’t try anything stupid.”

  The scientist tucked his pistol back into his waistband and then undid the restraints on Paul’s ankles. He stood back up and then bit his lip as he looked at the large, strong, tattooed prisoner. “If you do anything to me, you’ll be killing both of us and all of your friends in the process. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t understand a damn thing that’s going on in this place, but I do know it doesn’t do me any good to beat your ass.” Paul winked at the scrawny, bearded scientist and added, “At least not yet.”

  Oliver undid the buckles around Paul’s wrists and the big man wobbled as he stepped forward. Oliver was going to catch him, but then backed away, frightened of falling for a ruse. Paul staggered and dropped to his knees hard. He thudded down on the tile.

  “Fuck, man. Thanks for the help,” said Paul as he forced himself to stand. He felt weaker than he expected.

  “Sorry, I was worried you’d go for the gun.” Oliver took the gun back out from his waistband and inspected it.

  Paul rubbed his wrists where the buckles had been choking off his circulation. “How many guards are out at the reservoir?”

  Oliver made Paul go into the hallway first and stayed several feet behind, the gun pointed at the burly man’s back. “Just three, but there’re a couple nurses in the basement here.”

  “Three guards?” asked Paul. “That’s it?”

  “Turn left.” Oliver instructed Paul on where to go in the dark complex. “They pulled support for the project. Tom was going to shut it down. They said too much money had been spent, and cut all my funding.”

  “What project?” asked Paul. “What the hell is it that you guys were doing here?”

  “I’m the one asking the questions,” said Oliver. “Tell me what you know about The Skeleton Man. What happened to you when you were unconscious?”

  “It’s all a bit muddled,” said Paul. “I don’t know what was a dream and what was real.”

  “It was all real,” said Oliver. “Tell me everything.”

  “It wasn’t all real,” said Paul. “Not if you’re telling the truth about my friends being alive. Because I saw them die. I saw them bleeding on the floor. I watched them get shot.”

  “That was after he got to you,” said Oliver.

  “After who got me? Tom?”

  “No, no,” said Oliver, perturbed that Paul wasn’t following him. “After The Skeleton Man got you. None of your friends were killed. This is going to be too tough for you to comprehend, so just do me a favor and tell me everything that you remember.”

  “What’s going to be too tough for me to comprehend?” Paul stopped as he asked the question. “Don’t treat me like an idiot. Tell me what’s going on here. Help me make sense of this shit.”

  “Okay, okay.” Oliver glanced nervously over his shoulder. “Just keep moving.” Paul did as he was told and Oliver struggled to figure out an easy way to explain what was going on. “Have you ever heard of the fourth dimension?”

  “Sort of,” said Paul. “But probably not in a scientific way. I remember them saying that movie theaters wanted to give people a 4D experience.”

  “No, no, for Christ’s sake, nothing like that at all. I’m talking about real science here, not marketing bullshit. Think of a basic graph, with a ‘y’ and an ‘x’ axis.”

  “I’m pretty shitty at math,” said Paul.

  “This isn’t math,” said Oliver. “Do you know what a graph looks like, with the line going up on one side and another line perpendicular to it on the bottom?”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “That’s representing two dimensions, height and width. Then you add in depth. Okay? Imagine drawing a line moving diagonal, away from where the other two lines meet. Are you following me?”

  “Sure,” said Paul.

  “That third line represents the third dimension. That’s what they’re talking about when they say that a movie is in 3D. The images you see have depth to them.”

  “What does this have to do with…”

  “I’m getting to it,” said Oliver, like a teacher at his wit’s end with a student. “The fourth dimension is time. It’s hard to explain how to visualize it, and you can’t do it with a simple graph example, but time influences everything. It’s supposed to be a constant, but it’s not. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “Nope,” said Paul.

  “This entity that you met, the one they refer to as The Skeleton Man, he seems to exist independent of the fourth dimension. Imagine someone existing independent of the third dimension, and they can just zip all over the place on that graph without being forced to adhere to the laws the rest of us do. It’s almost as if he can twist time around to confuse the people stuck in there with him.”

  “Stuck in where?” asked Paul.

  “In Widowsfield, or more precisely, in Widowsfield as it existed immediately after the cord was cut.”

  They reached an elevator, but saw that it was already in use. It was headed up.

  “Shit,” said Oliver. “Someone’s coming up here. Come on, let’s go to the stairs.”

  “You said something about a cord. What does that mean?” asked Paul.

  “Go down those stairs,” said Oliver as they came to a staircase. There were already muddy footprints that led down the stairs, and Paul realized that someone had recently walked through here. The halls were lit only by faint caged emergency backup bulbs, but he was fairly certain the tracks were fresh. He debated warning Oliver, but then the thin man urgently continued with his explanation. “Don’t worry about the cord, forget I said it. I’m just referring to the moment when the creature became sentient. It happened in 1996…”

  “On March 14th, at 3:14,” said Paul.

  “You’re close,” said Oliver. They were both speaking in whispers, cautious after seeing that at least one person was still in the facility. “But off by fourteen minutes.”

  “Then how does that number factor into all of this? Why is the name of the company you work for code for pi?”

  “It’s a math thing,” said Oliver. “The company was founded by scientists, funded by scientists, and run by scientists from all over the world. They wanted to choose a name that celebrated the universal beauty of mathematics, so they settled on a symbol that has been used by other like-minded individuals throughout history. Some of the founders were from Europe, so the name fit well. It allowed them to mask the whole operation as if it were just a European Investment Bank. The name fit so well. You see, mathematicians love to hide little puzzles in their work, as a sort of nod to the people that come along after and figure out the codes. It’s something that spans the breadth of human history. I bet you’ve never heard about how the Great Pyramid is a coded message sent from almost four thousand years ago to the people of today.”

  They continued down the stairs, and Paul moved slow. He was still addled by his time tied to the gurney.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s the same thing as the name of our company, Cada E.I.B. You see, the Great Pyramid of Giza is a structure that is about as far from a circle as you could imagine, and yet it was built specifically to showcase 3.14. The ratio of the perimeter to the height is the same as pi multiplied by two.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?” asked Paul.

  Oliver groaned and shook his head. “Don’t you get it? Whoever built the pyramid coded pi into a structure that couldn’t be any further from a circle. They did it as a way to send a communication of mathematical brotherhood into future generations.”

  “So how does it relate to what happened here?” asked Paul.

  “It’s the same thing,” said Oliver. “It’s the
exact same thing that we were trying to do.”

  They got to the bottom of the stairs and Oliver peered out the door. When he was confident they were alone, he motioned for Paul to go out into the hall.

  “Then you admit it,” said Paul.

  “Admit what?”

  “You admit that you had something to do with the people in the town disappearing.”

  “No one disappeared,” said Oliver. “Open the door across the hall.”

  Paul went to the set of double doors and pressed on the silver bar to open one of them. “What do you mean no one…”

  He didn’t have to finish asking the question because the answer was right in front of him. The room they walked into was filled with beds that were identical to the gurney he’d been strapped to moments earlier. Frail, skeletal men and women lay on the beds, all of them staring wide-eyed at the ceiling as tubes ran from the crooks of their arms to clear bags hung on posts beside them.

  “Meet the survivors of Widowsfield,” said Oliver. “The few that are still alive anyway. There used to be quite a few more than this.”

  Paul murmured a curse as he staggered into the room. There were at least a hundred beds here, each bearing what he would’ve mistaken for a corpse if not for the wheezing breaths they all took. It was a chorus of gasps, a terrifying sound that, once heard, would be impossible to keep out of nightmares from that day forward. Weak lungs in decrepit bodies struggling to draw breath, wheezing in and out, creating a rhythm that would haunt Paul.

  “They sound like they’re dying,” he said as he surveyed the disturbing scene. It was as if he’d stumbled back in time, and was witnessing an outbreak of typhoid.

  “But they’re not, I assure you,” said Oliver. “We keep a medical staff on hand to make sure we’re doing everything we can to keep them alive.”

  “Their breathing…” Paul was shocked by the ghoulish scene as the nearly dead continued to draw breath.

  “I know, it’s eerie. Sometimes when I’m here I close my eyes and imagine I’m standing at the dock on the River Styx, waiting for the ferryman to come. Their breath is the sound the water makes as it laps against the shore.”

  Paul glanced back at the scientist, appalled by his callous fantasy. “These are people, man. These are fucking human beings. What did you do to them?”

  Oliver had closed his eyes for a moment to imagine the ferryman appearing in the mist. He broke from his fantasy when he heard the anger in Paul’s voice. “Hey now, don’t forget who has the gun. All right? Just calm down. We’ve been doing everything we can to make sure these folks stay alive. We’ve got medical staff here constantly.” He glanced around, but didn’t see the nurses that were usually present.

  “What did you do to cause this to happen?” asked Paul as he clenched his fists.

  Oliver stepped back. “You want to save your friends, right?”

  “Yes,” said Paul with his jaw locked tight.

  “Then you have to trust me. I’m the only chance you’ve got. I’m the only chance any of these people have. I’m trying to save them.”

  “How did this happen?” asked Paul.

  Oliver was nervous, even though he was the one with the gun. “Trust me, there’s no time to explain everything. We need to get moving before Tom’s buddies find him.”

  “Is Alma here?” asked Paul.

  Oliver hesitated. “Your friends are here. But I think your time with The Skeleton Man twisted up your memories. Don’t get angry, but Alma Harper has been dead for years.”

  “Show me where my friends are,” said Paul.

  “Over that way,” Oliver pointed to the far side of the room, beside another set of doors. “The people in here are stabilized, but we keep close attention on any new victims here. It’s rare that we find new sleepers.”

  “Sleepers?”

  “Yeah, that’s what the nurses call the people affected by the illness. They don’t qualify as being in a coma, exactly, because they have periodic waking moments. They’ll start talking, or flail around like a sleeping person reacting to a dream, thus the moniker. We used to have so many more of them here, but they die off here and there. There was a time where almost every room in the facility had a gurney and a sleeper in it. But those were all the original victims, and many of them have died off by now.”

  Oliver continued to explain as they made their way between the rows of gurneys. Paul went first, with Oliver five feet behind, the gun aimed at the big man’s back.

  “It’s rare that we ever find new sleepers, but every once in a while some stupid kids sneak into town. We’ll find them unconscious, and bring them here. That’s how Tom and his crew got so adept at faking deaths. I’ve lost count of how many poor souls have been written off as catfish fodder after their clothes got caught in the grates over at the Jackson Reservoir Dam.”

  Paul looked down at one of the skeletal patients. His skin was draped over his skull, devoid of elasticity and sagged by a life spent staring at the ceiling. The man’s eyes were bloodshot, and the lids were scabbed, but glistened even in the low light of the emergency bulbs. It appeared that the nurses had smeared Vaseline over his eyes to keep them from drying out. He had severely chapped lips and his mouth was open just slightly. Paul saw the man’s tongue moving within his mouth.

  “The new sleepers are the ones that are vulnerable,” said Oliver.

  “Vulnerable to what?”

  Oliver seemed amused by what Paul had asked. “Well, now, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? I wish I knew. The best I can guess is that one of the entities in the town gets tired of them. I really don’t know, but sometimes new sleepers die, and it’s never a pretty sight.”

  “Die from what?” asked Paul.

  “We have no idea. They just suddenly wake up and start screaming. They push and fight and scream, almost like they’re trying to fight someone off that we can’t see. Then they start foaming at the mouth and fall dead. It’s a truly awful thing to witness, and I hope I never see it again.”

  They neared the set of doors that led to where Paul’s friends were being kept when a shrill cry startled them both. A woman was screaming from the next room and they could hear the clatter of a bed as someone thrashed atop it.

  Chapter 21 – Solving the Puzzle

  There’s a fascinating theory about how an eternity in heaven or hell can both reside in a single minute of time. We’re all beholden to the inevitable ticking of our clocks, and so we assume that all of reality is tied to the same countdown. This idea is so ingrained in our heads that even when one of the most famous scientists in modern history challenged it, the world scoffed at him.

  Albert Einstein tried to explain his theory of relativity by using the example of two twins. One twin enters a space shuttle and shoots off into space, traveling at nearly the speed of light. Then the astronaut turns around and returns to Earth. Upon arriving back on land, the astronaut would be remarkably younger than the twin that stayed behind.

  Seems impossible, right? It’s not. The twin on Earth is beholden to a different flow of time. The reason it’s hard to grasp is because it challenges your perception of reality. Indeed, it proves your perception wrong in very fundamental ways.

  My point is that time is not an absolute. It’s a malleable thing, and the theory I was referring to earlier suggests that the human mind is able to create an entire afterlife experience for us, just in the few minutes or seconds it has before we die.

  This theory is used to explain the accounts that some people have of an afterlife when they are brought back to life in a hospital. People often claim to have gone to heaven and met loved ones that had passed on. This theory, also known as the False Eternity Syndrome, posits that our own brains are capable of crafting convincing, comforting afterlives, and that we are tricked into spending what feels like days, years, or perhaps much longer in that paradise before our brain finally stops functioning.

  You’re already familiar with this experience. All of us can recall a mo
ment where we were in danger, and it seemed as if time itself slowed down. Our brains are able to switch into high gear, and collect a vast amount of information about the world around us as we fight to survive.

  If the False Eternity Syndrome theory proves to be true, then we’ll finally understand the truth about heaven and hell, and perhaps even God. All of it is just a trick of our minds, and our afterlife is just a manipulation of time – a sort of calm passing into the long, dark night; a slow trip down the River Styx that our brains have molded for us in our final moments.

  Our brains lie to us in those last moments. Indeed, they always have.

  Widowsfield

  February 20th, 2007

  Nia and Mindy walked along Main Street in Widowsfield. Every day it came closer to looking like it had eleven years ago.

  Oliver and Lee had worked tirelessly to recreate the town to look as it had on March 14th, 1996. They never admitted it, but Nia suspected that they were trying to make the town appear as it had on that day before they reached the anniversary. That gave them less than a month to work, and there was a lot yet to be done.

  Oliver had asked Nia to describe as much as possible about the town in the days leading up to the infamous date. Lee furiously sketched, recording as much detail as Nia could provide. Then the company, Cada E.I.B., began shipping in furniture and equipment to transform the ghost town back into an approximation of what it had once been.

  The activity around them was slow at first, but increased as the days went on. Now Widowsfield was alive again, even if it was only the staging of a falsehood. The streets were filled with construction workers, tirelessly fixing buildings that had been forgotten and left to succumb to the ravages of time. Door by door, Widowsfield was being reinvigorated. It was as if they were being transported back in time.

  “Around and around we go,” said Nia as she passed the Anderson Used Book store. She looked over to the street where a UPS truck was parked. “Where we stop, only the devil knows.”