Phoenix Heart (27 page)

“Andrew, we’re in the Men’s Room.”

“Hush,” he whispered, “I know.”

“Okay,” I whispered back. “But if anyone comes in here, you’re
going to have to explain.”

“Fine, now hush.” He waved a hand back at me, then stood,
head bowed, listening.

I watched him for a moment, but then my eyes began to
wander. After all, I’d never been in a Men’s Room. Well, technically I’d been
in a Boy’s Room. In second grade, my best friend Maureen Benson had dared me to
run through the Boy’s Room near Mr. Corkson’s science room because it had a
door in the hall and another door on the other end that led into the
playground. I had naturally double-dared Maureen back, and the two of us had
run through, out the other end, straight into the arms of a playground
supervisor. We’d spent an hour in the principal’s office after school and it
would have been worth it except I hadn’t seen anything because I’d been running
with my eyes closed.

I snuck a look at Andrew, and then started to move past the
stalls to take a peek at what lay around the corner. It’s not that I thought
men had anything truly special in this little sanctuary, but I had always been
curious why it was one of their favorite places to read.

“Melanie? “Hey,” he whispered, “where are you going?”

I spun around, hands clasped behind my back. “Nowhere.”

“Come on then. I don’t hear anything. Let’s try again.” He
cracked the door and peered out, then pushed the door wide and beckoned me to
follow.

We moved silently out into the hall. There was no sign of
life the length of the corridor or through the supply room windows. We walked
quickly to the doors and pushed them open. A long counter faced us; no one was
behind it or in sight down the many long aisles of shelves. Andrew walked over
and swung a hinged section of the counter up, ushered me through, and then
eased it down and led me back between two of the long shelf units.

On one side of the aisle glassware filled the shelves, floor
to ceiling, ranging in size from tiny beakers that would hold no more than a
couple of tablespoons, to giant flasks that would hold a couple of gallons. On
the other side were large and small, clear and brown bottles of powders and
liquids. As we moved quickly past them I saw Glycerin on one dark bottle,
Ammonium Hydroxide on a jar of white powder. Dozens of different chemicals
lined the shelves.

“Hey, somebody there?” We froze. The voice had come from the
left on the other side of a shelf unit filled to the ceiling with small
cardboard boxes.

Come on, Andrew’s lips said. I nodded and we ran on our toes
toward the back of the room.

“Is somebody there?” The voice was more insistent and had
moved toward the front of the room.

We ducked behind a stack of cardboard boxes.

The footsteps stopped. “Fine,” grumbled the voice. “Play
games.”

“Come on.” Andrew’s voice was barely audible. We passed back
through large crates of equipment, stacks of boxes--some marked Centrifuge
Tubes, 25 ml., some Petri Dish, pack of 10, STERILE. Far back behind the boxes,
behind the crates, all the way in the back of the enormous room was a large
dusty place full of old equipment. A couple of worn-looking incubators sat
against the wall. An ancient, door-less Frigidaire stood nearby, its racks
empty except for a thin coating of grime. Its door leaned against a monstrous
old chest freezer that sat in the far corner of the room.

“The equipment graveyard,” whispered Andrew. “Where all old
machinery comes to die. Nobody comes back here. We should be safe.”

I nodded and moved across toward the incubators. A small
space had been left open on the cement floor between them and the refrigerator.
I waved a hand at the cement, at the cinderblock wall behind it and the enameled
metal of the appliances on each side. “This is nice,” I whispered as I sat
down. “Cozy. Warm. A throw-rug here, a pillow there, it’ll be beautiful.”

“Wait,” said Andrew. He lifted his flannel shirt, pulled out
the pillow stuffed there and handed it to me with a grand sweep of the arm.

I batted my eyes as I lifted up and put it between me and
the ice cold cement as I sat down. “You are so gallant.”

“Yes, that’s true.” He eased himself down next to me. He
winced as he lowered himself, and he was still breathing a trifle rapidly from
our dash up the aisle, but we both ignored it. He looked at his watch. “We’re
going to have a hell of a wait,” he said. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

“Sleep? Are you nuts? I’m wound up so tight I don’t think I’ll
ever sleep again.”

He looked at me with some exasperation. “Well, I know you
haven’t had enough sleep in the last couple of days. And I know for a fact that
you didn’t get any sleep last night.”

I looked away. “I got plenty.”

“You couldn’t have. When I went to sleep you were on the
other side of the mattress, but when I woke up you were curled up on the floor
near the patio doors. Nobody can sleep on the floor and get a good night’s
sleep.”

I brushed some dirt off the knee of my jeans. “I can.”

“I don’t know why you didn’t just stay on the mattress.”

Sure you don’t.

“The floor was more comfortable.”

There was a long moment of silence, then Andrew shifted on
the cold concrete and grimaced. “Then you should be in seventh heaven, now.”

I reached under me for the pillow. “You want your pot belly
back?”

He looked offended. “Would Sir Walter Raleigh take back his
coat while the fair damsel was halfway through the mud puddle? I think not.” He
looked down at the cement and shifted again. “But give me a couple of hours. I
just might be thinking about it then.”

* * * *

“Melanie.”

I stirred, frowned, and moved closer.

“Melanie,” he whispered. He stroked my hair, lifted it back
from my face. “Time to wake up.”

But I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. I was crouched down in the
Safe Place again, near the fireplace, back home, trying to cram back against
the bricks, feeling them digging into my back. Something was coming, something
loud and dark and horrifying and I was trying to get safe but the Safe Place
had no power anymore. The Thing was going to get me and smoothly, seamlessly, I
was an adult and there was a party in the room, all the people I knew, Maggie
and Maggie’s husband Brian, Chuck and Cheryl, Lance, Mr. Jackson from the bank
and they were all talking about me. I still crouched in the corner, but they
didn’t appear to see me. Poor Melanie, they were saying. Sad, isn’t it? I wish
there was something we could do. I put my hands over my ears; they were fists
and I was holding them as tightly as I could but the voices continued. Poor,
poor, Melanie. I guess she’ll always be alone. Too bad.

Then, suddenly the voices stopped. I took my hands away. There
was no sound. I dared to open my eyes. The people were parting, opening a path.
And it was Andrew they were parting for, Andrew who was walking towards me. The
pain, the fear dissolved, burned away by a flood of complete and utter joy. He
stopped in front of me, took my hands and lifted me from the corner. I began to
cry because it was too much to bear. He pulled me to him and held me.

“Melanie, come on now, wake up.”

I opened my eyes. The light was dim, coming now from one
emergency light set high on the wall toward the front of the storeroom. I sat
on the cement floor, my legs tucked under me, lying against Andrew, my head on
his shoulder, his arm around me. I looked at him.

“Hey,” he said softly. He smoothed back my hair. “What is
it?”

I blinked and pushed back against the incubator, and his arm
dropped away. “Nothing,” I said. “A dream.”

“A bad dream?”

“Yes and no.” I stretched and raked back my hair. “It’s
already fading. What time is it?”

“10:30.”

I stood up, stretched again, but stopped abruptly when I saw
that Andrew was watching me. I reached back down for the pillow. “You want your
stomach back?”

“No need now, I think.” He pushed off from the wall,
grimaced and settled back to the floor.

“You want a hand?” I asked.

Andrew looked up. “If you clap I’ll wallop you.”

“Just give me your hand.”

I grabbed his wrist and pulled until he stood beside me. In
the dim light he looked pale again and even though he’d wiped off most of the
eyeliner, his eyes looked shadowed. “Are you going to be all right?” I asked.

“Yes. I just got stiff sitting on that cold floor. I’ll be
fine.”

“Okay.”

“I said I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. Who’s arguing?”

He looked around the area, then back to me. “You ready?”

I took a deep breath. “As I’ll ever be.”

“Onward and upward, then.” He headed out into the shadows
between the stacks of equipment and crates, toward the front of the storeroom. I
took another deep breath and plunged into the shadows after him.

The only sounds came from the squeak of the rubber soles of
our shoes and the brush of denim against denim. It echoed loudly across the
room. I was wound so tight I half expected the glassware to start vibrating in
sympathy. We ducked back through the front counter and Andrew carefully
unbolted the front doors. He paused to listen, then nodded and we slipped out
and turned to the left down the corridor toward the front of the building. Other
than a small penlight Andrew held, the only illumination came from the green
exit signs over the outer doors at the end of the hall, a faint security light
about halfway down, and the faint reflection from operating lights on some of
the equipment in the labs. About fifty feet down on the right was an elevator. We
had decided that the noise of an elevator was worth the risk since it would
save Andrew having to climb three flights of stairs. But when he pushed the
button, the loud clunk as the car started down and a louder grinding whir from
the motor made us both jump.

“Maybe we should have taken the stairs after all,” he
whispered as he looked to the right and left.

“But your side.”

He looked at me, surprised. “You could have carried me.”

“Dream on, buddy,” I whispered back.

The car arrived with a thump and a loud bell pealed out its
arrival. The sound seemed to bounce down the walls of the hall, magnifying as
it went. When the doors opened we both leapt in and Andrew quickly pressed the
button for the fourth floor.

“We might as well have brought a brass band,” I whispered.

“Nah. The sound of this elevator would have drowned them
out.”

The car stopped on the fourth floor with the same loud bell
proclaiming our arrival. We both carefully poked our heads out and looked to
the left and then the right. The hall duplicated the one downstairs except for
the fact that most of the doors had frosted glass inset in them indicating more
private labs and fewer classrooms. No lights shone behind any of the glass
panels, no sounds of voices, no rumble of centrifuges or clink of glassware
came from under the doors. Andrew had warned me that even at 10:30 or 11:00
there might still be a grad student or two around finishing up an experiment,
but that it being Tuesday night, it might be less likely, and it appeared we
had been lucky.

Andrew turned right toward the front of the building. A
security light matching the one downstairs mounted on the wall behind us cast
pale, elongated versions of each of us across the linoleum floor and up over
the wall. The shadow figures rippled in and out of doorways, over bulletin
boards, across fire extinguishers, and gradually dimmed as we approached the
light coming through the windows in the front hallway. That light came from
streetlamps in the campus quad four floors below. Coming up at an angle,
through the ivy framing the windows it cast exaggerated shadows of leaves back
down the hall. A gentle breeze outside rustled the leaves and the giant shadows
moved eerily across the two of us and over the walls and doorways. Alfred
Hitchcock would have loved it; I indisputably did not.

We reached the front hall and turned right toward the lab
which lay at the opposite end. Logically, four floors up, in a dark building,
no one from outside could possibly see us, but even so, we both hugged the wall
opposite the windows, hunched over, sliding in and out of doorways. As we
approached the lab suite at the front corner of the building, I could just make
out the black lettering on the glass: J.P. Harrison.

Once seen, I couldn’t take my eyes from those letters. They
grew larger as we approached, and darker. Four or five years ago J. P. Harrison’s
name and face had begun to pop up in magazine articles, and then on an
occasional interview show. He was a natural for such forums: intelligent, prone
to smiling, glib, and he looked like the grandfather everyone would love to
have--jolly, round but not fat, prematurely white-haired. He had a gift for
explaining the unexplainable, putting genetic engineering in terms the lay
person could understand, taking the fear out of the new discoveries coming out
of that rapidly moving field. His appearances in science magazines and Sunday
morning interview shows became more frequent, and in the last year or so he had
also begun to be seen shaking hands with politicians at fundraisers and
standing arm-in-arm with movie stars at global warming rallies. His name,
listed among the luminaries supporting a cause, gave whatever crusade it might
be validity. He was a celebrity and beginning to be a household name, doing for
biology what Carl Sagan had done for physics. Therefore, planning to break into
his lab in the middle of the night, though scary, had also been a little bit
fun, a little bit exciting.

But his name on the door. In black paint. For the first time
since this had all begun, the sight of those letters took him from the
two-dimensions of the popular media into the three dimensions of reality. And
if he was real, than this situation was real.