The Great Forgetting (26 page)

After she'd left Nils in the parking lot at Pymatuning, she had gone back to the Gate House and found the door open an inch. She went in. Then she heard the voices below. The sound was coming up a winding staircase in the middle of the floor. She'd gone to find out who was there, knowing it must be Jack, had to be Jack, because who else could it be? “Hello?” she had called out. And then the voices stopped and she felt the first tingling of apprehension. When this man's wrinkled face appeared around the curve, she screamed. In a flash, he grabbed her, dragged her down to this dungeon room that looked like something out of a seventies cop shop. Ever since, they'd just sat here.

Finally, the door opened and a man—a real, recognizable-as-a-man man—entered, carrying a thin manila folder. He was dressed in a suit and tie but no Panama hat. His hair was blond and cut short, military-style. He appeared to be in his midthirties, the sort of rugged Texas-handsome guy Sam liked to dance with at the Boot Skoot in Brimfield on occasion.

“Afternoon, Ms. Brooks,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” He took a chair beside the man in the Panama hat and set the folder on the table. Sam could see her name written on the tab.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked.

The man smiled. It was an honest, friendly smile, and she felt herself relax.

“My name is Greg Carr,” he said, uncuffing her wrist. She rubbed it, hesitantly. “I work for the NSA, the National Security Agency? Probably you didn't know this, but the Gate House is federal property. You were trespassing. This is Scopes. He's in charge of security for our small department.”

“Scopes?” she asked, looking to him. He didn't blink.

“He's a … private contractor.”

“Okay,” said Sam. “I didn't know I was trespassing. I was only trying to find a friend and…”

“Jack Felter?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Because we're looking for Jack, too. He kidnapped an NSA agent in New York earlier this afternoon.”

She was stunned into silence.

“It's terribly important we find Jack, Ms. Brooks. We don't want anybody getting hurt.”

“That can't be right. Jack wouldn't kidnap anyone.”

“I assure you, what I'm telling you is the truth. All I ask, in return, is for you to do the same.”

She nodded.

“What do you know about this mental patient, the boy, Cole?”

“He was my husband's patient. Tony Sanders.”

“What do you know about the boy's condition?”

“Condition?”

“His delusion.”

“Nothing.”

“Let me speed this up,” Agent Carr said, wiping his forehead. “What do you know about the Great Forgetting?”

“The what?”

“Don't be coy.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

The man in the Panama suit grunted.

“What do you know about fluoride?” Agent Carr demanded. “What do you know about HAARP?”

Sam saw it then. Tony really had stumbled onto something. There was some nugget of truth in the boy's strange stories. Certainly the whole thing couldn't be true. But a piece of it? Could the kid have picked something up from his father, the details of a covert NSA program or something? Whatever it was, she knew her best chance of walking out of the Gate House was to play dumb.

“I don't know anything,” she said. “I promise.”

Agent Carr sighed. “Have it your way, Ms. Brooks.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out what appeared to be a Walkman cassette recorder attached to a tiny handheld radar dish. He put the seashells in his ears and lifted the device so that it pointed at Sam's head.

“What's that?” she asked.

“A forgotten toy.”

He fiddled with a knob on the Walkman, and then, suddenly, Sam's head filled with a palpable hum. It felt like she was standing in front of a tall speaker that was pointed at a microphone in some punk rock club, as if her thoughts had folded back on her in a loop, building feedback behind her eyes. Agent Carr dialed down the knob and the pressure slagged off a bit.

“What do you know about the Great Forgetting?”

“Nothing, I told you,” she said. But then an image flashed in her mind. She was back in Dr. Kimberly Quick's office.
Did you ever hear Tony talk about a place called Mu?
she had asked. And that's when Quick had told her the basics of Cole's theories, how the government was brainwashing people with chemicals and rewriting their memories through radio broadcasts, about a secret island off the Alaskan coast.

“You lied to me, Ms. Brooks,” said Agent Carr.

“You read my mind,” she whispered.

“That's right.” He pulled out the earbuds and secreted the radio back into his pocket. He opened her file and wrote some notation in the margins of his report.

“Can I go?” she asked.

Agent Carr laughed. “No.”

“I'd like to call a lawyer, then. I have rights.”

“This is a United States military tribunal. You don't have any rights.”

“Am I being charged with something?” she asked. Her heart thumped rapidly against her chest. She could see her blouse rising and falling with its momentum. Her underarms dripped perspiration.

“Treason,” he said. “Your sentence is ‘identity modification.' Effective immediately.”

“This is some kind of joke.”

Scopes grunted.

“No joke, ma'am.” Agent Carr finished writing, then crossed to her chair and cuffed her hands together. “Come with me,” he said. He pulled at her shackles, leading her out the door. Scopes followed.

Tears welled up. This was a bad dream. She would wake up soon, back in bed, sweating with fear, thankful to be home.

“Who was the man who came with you?” asked Agent Carr as they walked down a wide concrete corridor lit by flickering fluorescents. “That fat guy.”

“His name is Nils,” she said.

“Well, we had to kill him, I'm afraid. He tried to break down the Gate House door. Put up quite a fight for a minute.”

She started to cry. Agent Carr pulled her down a thinner hallway that ended at a door with a frosted-glass window. Upon it was etched
DELIVERY/PICKUP
. He brought her inside.

It was some kind of post office, a small room crammed with boxes and envelopes. Laminated memos were taped to the walls. A poster near the counter showed Uncle Sam towering over a ruined city.
NEVER FORGET WHY WE FORGOT!
it read.

Set into the wall beside the counter was a giant glass tube running through something like an MRI machine lined with panels and readouts. Agent Carr pushed a button and a door opened on the tube with a hiss of trapped air. A long bed lay within. Not an MRI, she realized. It reminded her of the machine she used to pick up her prescriptions at the twenty-four-hour drive-thru in Ravenna. It was a vacuum tube. Big enough for humans.

“No,” she said. She was no longer crying. She was much too terrified to cry.

“Get in,” he ordered. Scopes pulled a revolver from a holster and aimed it at her chest.

Sam stepped up to the tube. Scopes pushed her, hard, with the barrel of the gun.

“Lie down,” said Agent Carr.

Sam climbed inside and lay flat on her back. “Please,” she said.

But Agent Carr was done with her. He sealed the lid. There was a loud
FOOOOMP!
and then she was being launched down the tube at something near the speed of light, or so it felt to her.

4
    A fisherman found the fat man's body and called ranger Bat Hadley. By the time the ranger got to the Gate House there were a dozen smelly anglers moping around the remains, taking pictures. That was all he needed, a photo of a dead guy in his park.

“Christ,” he said when he saw the body sprawled beside the creepy wooden door of the NSA outpost.

“You know him, Bat?” asked a woman with a chipped front tooth.

“Yup,” he said. “It's that cop from Franklin Mills.”

The detective had been shot at close range, between the eyes. But something funny had happened to his arm. It looked gray and deformed, and when Bat kicked it with his boot it dissolved into fine ash and blew away in the breeze.

5
    They met at a rest stop at the base of Big Indian Mountain, a green child of the Catskills range. Nils transferred their gear into the trunk of Sam's car and then climbed in the back. They left the truck behind. Jack was touched to see that Sam had gone through the trouble of boiling eight gallons of water. That would come in handy if they really were traveling all the way to Alaska.

He drove the winding switchbacks of Big Indian with Cole riding shotgun so he could navigate the TacMars. For a while the road was paved and lined with heather and Russian thistle. Great maples provided a thick canopy. Streams meandered down slopes, feeding Esopus Creek. There was a path on the side of the road for hikers and riders. Soon deciduous trees gave way to knotty pines. At a dirt trail nearly hidden by ferns, Cole told Jack to turn.

“We used to get this feeling in the bush, sometimes,” the Captain said quietly. “That feeling in your gut that says to turn around. The men who ignored it and pushed on usually stepped on a Bouncing Betty or something and that was all she wrote. Like the voice of God shaking your insides and telling you to go home.”

Jack didn't stop. A little ways down the trail, the road got muddy and threatened to suck in the tires. Jack parked and they got out. It would be completely dark in three hours. He wondered if there was enough time to find Sam and get back before sunset.

The path ended in the mire, a great flat bog that smelled like damp death. Dead lumber jutted from stagnant pools like the rotted teeth of the mountain herself. A thin, noxious mist obscured their feet. A million crickets played a discordant lullaby. Nils picked up a rock the size of a baseball and chucked it into the nearest mud pool. It hit the earth with a wet smack, like a lover's kiss, and then disappeared.

“That's not good,” said the Viking.

“I remember the way,” said Cole. “Stay close. Walk where I walk.” The boy stepped onto a patch of high grass. Jack took the Captain's hand, lending support, and Nils followed. Their progress was measured in inches. A couple of times Cole muttered a curse and made them double back. Jack sensed they were coming to the other side, when the Captain stepped into the mire.

“Fuck a duck!” he shouted.

His father's right leg was sunk up to the knee. The earth belched and his leg slipped deeper.

“Help me!” Jack yelled. He pulled at the Captain, both arms wrapped around the old man's delicate torso. Cole grabbed the back of Jack's shirt with both hands and tugged. Nils bent at the Captain's legs and yanked, hard.

“Ow!” the Captain said. “You're going to pull off my foot, you dumb ox!”

For a long, terrifying pause, nothing happened. Then, slowly, the Captain's leg began to slip free. They repositioned and pulled again. The leg popped out all at once, sending them backward, onto the ground in a pile.

Jack let out his breath and began to laugh with giddy relief. Nils and Cole laughed, too. The Captain suppressed a smile. “I feel like a scoutmaster again,” he said. “In charge of one of those ‘special troops,' the ones that take the short bus to camp and sing shit in the middle of lunch when nobody wants to hear them sing.”

Cole found the tree five minutes later. Jack could see that it wasn't a normal oak. The bark was too polished. Plasticine, maybe.

“You guys realize who we are?” asked Cole.

“What are you talking about?” said Jack.

“We're the characters from
The Wizard of Oz
. The good guys from the story? The Scarecrow,” he said, pointing to the Captain, “who needs a new brain. The Tin Man,” he said, pointing to Jack, “who needs to get his heart back, and the Cowardly Lion,” he said, pointing at Nils.

“Hey!” said the Viking.

“So who does that make you?” asked Jack.

Cole shrugged.

“He's a friend of Dorothy's,” the Captain grumbled. “Hey, Toto, open the goddamn door so we can see what's inside.”

Cole pushed the panel. It clicked open easily. “We are the music makers,” he whispered, typing the code. “We are the dreamers of dreams.”

“For fuck's sake,” said the Captain.

“Uh,” said Nils, “I'm taking a lot on faith here. But could someone please explain to me who built a fake tree in the middle of a swamp?”

6
    Here was the long corridor Cole had traveled with his father in some long-ago, better world. It stretched forever both ways, a current of cool air ripping through the tunnel, black cables snaking down the walls like veins. They followed the boy, quieting their footfalls with careful steps, afraid the sound would carry to the beasts that lurked inside.

Cole felt crummy for manipulating Jack. He did. But he knew if he had told Jack what he really wanted he could never have gotten him to bring him here. He'd had three years to plan it and he'd played him good: pushing them eastward by feeding Jack scraps of information, getting him to New York. He knew that if he got Jack to New York, he could talk him into coming here. Sam's kidnapping, that was serendipity.

They came to the intersection of a long-abandoned reception area. A sign on the wall read
SECURITY/GULAG/STORAGE
. Somebody had scribbled black Magic Marker over
SECURITY
and had written
Maestro
above it. Cole went to the panel in the wall and pushed it open, revealing nine CCTV screens that showed live feeds from different sections of the Underground.

“Do you see her?” asked Jack, peering over Cole's shoulder.

There was only one place Sam could be. Cole found her immediately. His heart sank. Now Jack would want to run to rescue her, and they couldn't. Not until he got what he'd come for. He might never get another chance.