Fixer (21 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Corry said. There was a slight change in Mr. Nilsson’s voice; it was subtle but enough to make Corry want to get away from him. 

“These others, they’re there at the edge. Do you understand? And they don’t like to be seen.”

“Okay, sure,” Corry said. He had looked away from Mr. Nilsson and was now gazing lovingly at the doorknob. Because while he didn’t understand whom Mr. Nilsson was talking about, he was starting to appreciate why the old man had checked into McClaren.

“You need to listen to me,” Mr. Nilsson said, and now his voice was louder, maybe even loud enough to be heard out in the hall.

“All right . . .”

Mr. Nilsson sprang to his feet and put his hand on the door before Corry could open it. “I’m entirely serious, young man!
Don’t let them know you can see them
. Whatever you do with the rest of your life, you must remember that. This is
important
.”

“Who . . .” Corry began to say before he realized all the saliva in his mouth had suddenly dried up. He tried again. “Who are they?”

“They’re going to kill me when they find me,” he whispered, gripping Corry’s shoulder tightly. He smelled like sweat and Old Spice. “And they will find me. Because I’ve seen.”

“Let me go, Mr. Nilsson,” Corry said, trying to eradicate the quaver in his voice as much as he could. “Please.”

“Promise me!”

Corry looked into Mr. Nilsson’s face. His teeth were browning on the edges and he had a piece of something green stuck between two of them and his breath smelled like fish. And he was scaring the shit out of Corry. There would be no friendly chats about the Secret Future with this man. He was nuts.

“All right, sure,” Corry said, thinking that agreeing with his captor was probably the best solution. “I promise.”

Mr. Nilsson held onto him for a few more seconds and then let go and stepped aside. “Good,” he said. “That’s a good boy.”

Seizing the chance to leave, Corry grabbed the handle and jerked the door open, got two steps into the hallway . . . and ran right into Ned.

“There you are!” he said. “The hell were you doing?”

“I hadda go to the bathroom,” Corry lied, grabbing his stomach. “Diarrhea. Must’a been the food here or something. Didn’t think you’d mind, my not waiting for you to get back.”

Ned stared at him. “Mr. Parseghian is sitting in his room,” he said. “You wanna tell me what the hell that was about?”

“Is he?” Corry said, trying to keep his voice level. “Could’ve sworn I saw him outside.”

Ned nodded, staring into Corry’s eyes and trying to figure out exactly how much of that story was the truth. Corry stared back, which is what one did when trying to pull off a lie. Ned broke away, glanced at the bathroom door, and tried to see the angles. It didn’t seem possible that Corry would lie about what he saw outside just so that he could go to the bathroom by himself, and as it never occurred to Ned that there might be someone else in there, he couldn’t work it out.

Ned stepped aside and gestured toward the lobby.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s wait for your mother, see what she has to say about all of this, huh?” Like Violet would have any better luck than Ned in detecting when Corry was lying.

Corry walked past the guard without a word, the warning of a crazy man still ringing in his ears. 

Don’t let them know you can see them
. 

As if he didn’t get enough nightmares already.

Chapter Fifteen

Corry didn’t visit McClaren hospital more than a couple of times for the rest of the summer. He told Violet this was because the summer camp had more fun trips than usual, and while this was sort of true, it was also true that the less he saw of Mr. Nilsson, the better.

It was quite a problem for a young man to have to deal with. On the one hand, he’d never met another person who could see things like he could, which was a big deal, especially since that person was so much older than he was. Older people knew a lot about a lot of things. Even crazy old people. Especially crazy old people. And Corry had so many questions he wanted to ask that it kept him up some nights. On the other hand, Mr. Nilsson had turned out to be not just crazy but also creepy and paranoid. Being alone with him in the bathroom for those few minutes in July had driven home the point about Bad Touching that Violet was always trying to make. It wasn’t that Mr. Nilsson had actually touched him in a bad way, but Corry understood now how helpless he would feel should an adult try to do so. He didn’t like that feeling at all.

When he did visit, he stuck to card games with Mr. Pierce. Mr. Nilsson was always there in his chair, but he didn’t try to talk to Corry—secretively or otherwise. Corry, in turn, did not try to talk to him. He did make several attempts to “speak” in the future, like Mr. Nilsson had done, but found it impossible. If he knew he wasn’t going to speak, then he didn’t speak, no matter how much he insisted to himself that he did. It seemed he couldn’t figure out how to fake out the Secret Future.

And now school was about to start again. He had petitioned Violet to let him spend more time at home, even though she preferred he go to McClaren every day and work on his homework there at the beginning of the year to
get off on the right foot
before the snow came and made it effectively impossible for him to do the work anywhere but at afterschool or at home. His argument was that since he was going into eighth grade, he was only one year away from high school, and in high school he surely would have to be more self-motivated about his homework, so wouldn’t it be a good idea to practice doing it without help
before
he got there?

The truth was, by the last week of August, as the Fastest Boy Alive raced down the Trapelo Road hill, he was expecting this to be his final trip to McClaren.

*  *  *

The first indication that things were a little bit off at the hospital was when Corry found the front gate attendance box empty. Carl wasn’t there. A couple of times in the past he’d found a different guard at the gate, but this time there was no Carl, and nobody else either. Which was too bad because Corry had actually started to follow a little baseball over the summer, so he had something to talk with the guard about. 

Corry pedaled on through the gate and rode his bike all the way up to the front door, half expecting that this would cause Carl to magically appear and yell at him for not walking it through the lot. When this also failed to produce the guard, Corry gave up and parked his bike.

The air conditioning greeted him pleasantly as he passed over the threshold into the hospital’s lobby. It had been a hot summer in general, and McClaren was the only place he was welcome that had central air. 

“Hi,” he greeted, walking to the reception desk. He couldn’t see anybody there, but as he was only a little over five feet tall that wasn’t all that unusual. Maybe they had just ducked behind the desk. Ned did this bunches of times when playing with the feed for the video monitors.

But nobody sat up at the sound of his voice. He hopped up onto his forearms, leaned over the counter, looked down, and found the desk chair empty. Which was really weird, especially in the greater context: no parking lot guard, no front desk guard.

Getting behind the desk was just a matter of lifting a hinged part and walking around. Corry skipped a step and ducked under, quickly confirming his aloneness.

“Must’a gone to the bathroom,” he said to himself, sitting down in the chair. That had to be it. He’d go down the hall to double-check, but after the hell he caught the last time he went down the hall alone he figured it’d be best if he just waited.

A few minutes passed. He whiled away the time shooting rubber bands at the video screens and wondering exactly who it was he was waiting for. Not Ned, surely. Ned would probably pee in the garbage can before he left the front desk unattended for so long. Ethel, maybe—she was pretty loose about the rules. Or Bob, a really tall guard with hairy knuckles and a goofy, high-pitched laugh Corry found sort of alarming.

After another couple of minutes it dawned on him that there wasn’t anybody coming. And if that were true, something was really and truly screwed up. 

He stepped up to the hallway door—which was closed—and put his ear up against it. This didn’t do much good other than to occupy him while he figured out what to do. 

And what
do
I do?

He would have to tell somebody the front desk was unattended, because that just wasn’t right. Anyone could walk in off the street and right down the hall through the always-unlocked door. Worse, Corry was pretty sure the Mildly Crazy patients didn’t have locks on their room doors, so one of them could wander out if he wanted to. Probably none of them did want to, but still.

Grabbing an internal phone directory, he started flipping through the laminated pages, looking for the right person to call. He knew the names of most of the hospital directors, but they didn’t really know him, so a phone call would be sort of odd. Better to contact somebody he knew. Violet, for instance.

Violet didn’t know he was coming, which was why she hadn’t been at the door to greet him. Lately, she had been giving him more latitude, to the extent that sometimes she didn’t even ask what his daily plans were. Corry had no idea how he’d earned the extra trust but thought it was so cool he didn’t want to ask about it and screw everything up. She’d probably think her pestering was missed. 

She worked in the Really Crazy wing most of the time. Corry had never been there, but didn’t figure he ever wanted to be, just based on some of the stories Violet sometimes told to other adults when she thought Corry wasn’t paying attention. The word
feces
came up a lot, which hadn’t bothered Corry until he looked up the word. It sounded to him like the patients there were very different from the ones he knew—and not in any good way. 

Fingering his way through the directory, he found a place described as the Medium Security Nurse Station. That had to be it. He picked up the phone.

And then Corry’s weird afternoon got weirder, because the phone wasn’t working. It was one of those really big telephones with bunches of extra buttons on them and four digit numbers written next to the buttons, but none of the buttons seemed to make the phone work. He checked the line leading from the phone into the wall and saw that it was intact. What was going on?

Sitting up again, some movement on the video monitor caught his eye. Any action on either screen was pretty easily noticeable because the only thing on display was the front door and the back door. He always thought of the monitors as unnecessary, because you could see the front door from the desk, anyway, and the back door wasn’t even supposed to be used except in case of fire.

The movement was at the back door. Someone was opening it from the inside. Corry didn’t know where the door was, but he remembered Ned saying how there was an alarm attached to it, which meant somewhere, an alarm was supposed to be going off. 

The door pushed open further. Whoever was doing it was having a lot of trouble, as if it weighed hundreds of pounds. Corry saw his face. He was dressed like a patient, but it wasn’t anybody Corry recognized. Probably, it was one of the Mildly Crazies he’d never met before. It couldn’t possibly be one of the Really Crazies. They didn’t have that kind of freedom.

The guy looked totally terrified. There was no sound, but the way his mouth kept opening and closing, Corry was pretty sure he was screaming. And for a second it looked like he was going to make it out, but then the door suddenly slammed shut—as if a really huge guy had just hit the outside of it. It happened so abruptly Corry actually jumped to his feet in surprise.

“All right, seriously,” he said to himself, his voice trembling slightly, “what’s going on?”

He ticked off the anomalies one more time, as if by lining them end-to-end they would form a picture he’d recognize, but it didn’t really help much except to make his heart beat faster. 

I should call the police
, he thought. Except the phones didn’t work. And he had no idea where the nearest police station was. And, he was probably totally overreacting. But in case he wasn’t, there was another matter to consider.

His mother was somewhere inside.

Corry had been calling her Violet since he was seven years old. It was entirely her idea. She said a lot of junk about treating each other like people and so on, but he thought the truth was she hated admitting she had a kid while she was still sort of young and pretty. And in a way it worked, at least for him, as he rarely thought of her as his mom anymore. She was just an older woman he had to answer to all the time. But word choice didn’t make her any less his mother, and at that moment the idea that she might be one of the people inside, screaming and trying to get out like the guy on the monitor, made a lump form in his throat that spread all the way to his stomach.

I’ll feel better once I know she’s okay
, he thought. 

But that meant going further into the hospital.

Screwing his resolve by swallowing a few dozen times to push down the creeping bile in the back of his throat, he walked to the ward room door and grabbed the handle.

He half expected it to be as heavy as the back door looked to have been on the video feed, but it swung open cleanly and easily. Corry knew before he formally looked down the hall—thanks to the Secret Future, which was a tremendous help for this particular scared twelve year old—that the hallway was empty. It was also mostly unlit. The corridor had regularly spaced fluorescent ceiling lights that, when on, left little to the imagination. But they were all off. Instead, at every T-junction, as well as above the door, was a small spotlight attached to a battery box. Emergency lights, he remembered. They were supposed to go on when the power went out. Corry wondered what else in the hospital relied on the same power as the lights. Not the video monitors, obviously. But it could be the phones did.

He stepped into the hall and felt the door close behind him, cutting him off from the sunlight coming in through the lobby windows. To further emphasize the strangeness of the emergency lighting, the spotlights were red. It made the white walls look like they were blood-colored, which was terribly creepy.