“There is no consensus,” said the Keeper.
We all voted for ourselves. I couldn’t foresee a time when we wouldn’t. It was all we had to keep us going: the possibility, however remote, of getting out of here, of getting back to life.
And all the while the Keeper watched us.
He was still there, appearing when least expected. Sometimes he came inside and made tea. Sometimes he worked on the Wincroft grounds as a gardener, wearing a black hooded slicker. In spite of the rain—which would, during some wakes, turn impossibly to snow, temperature dropping, swirls of snowflakes spinning like miniature tornadoes through the air—the Keeper trimmed vines, rosebushes, ivy, and privet, the wisteria and lilac knotting the trellis. He swept the stone paths and hoed flowerbeds. He stood atop a green ladder and cleared dead leaves from the gutters, wiped the glass panes clean on lanterns and lamps. He removed lichen from the wings of the crow gargoyles silently cawing.
Other times he could be spotted from a distance, a faceless silhouetted trespasser hurrying across the lawn and into the woods, as if taking a shortcut through Wincroft on his way somewhere else, somewhere unknown.
I don’t know how long we’d been in the Neverworld when we had the fight.
Time was vague here. It miraged and optical-illusioned the more you tried to look back on it, or fit it into a traditional monthly calendar. On close inspection, the hours were real. But if we tried to add them up into some larger understanding of the passage of time—how long we’d been here—they evaporated and grew unclear.
The passing of four wakes felt the same as four hundred.
The more wakes that passed, the more terrified I became. I could feel the others growing listless and distant, as if disinterested in ever actually leaving.
“I vote for Kanye!” shouted Cannon, raising his glass. “Kanye is my choice for who lives.”
“There is no consensus,” announced the Keeper.
Whitley began to drink all day. So did Cannon and Kipling. Then all three started helping themselves to the pills E.S.S. Burt kept in his master suite, hundreds of orange bottles of uppers and downers lining the medicine cabinets like candy in a sweet shop. It wasn’t uncommon for them all to be either manically hyper or unresponsive and lethargic. Kipling paced outside, having conversations with the rain, wearing nothing but that pink wig and a green silk peacock-patterned bathrobe belonging to one of Burt’s girlfriends.
Once, while gathering everyone for the vote, I couldn’t find him. Searching the mansion, I finally spotted him floating in the pool on a swan raft in the torrential rain.
“Kipling!” I grabbed the leaf net and used it to haul him to the side.
He could barely open his eyes. “Hello? You there, God? It’s me. Judy.”
“Kipling. Can you hear me?”
“I’d like to order room service, please. I’d like the spaghetti Bolognese.”
He rolled off the raft into the pool, sinking. I pulled off my shoes and raincoat and dove in after him, finding him drifting motionless along the bottom. Madly I kicked him back to the surface.
“Kipling! Can you hear me?”
“?‘It’s the final countdown,’?” he sang, his eyes slits.
I was the lone nurse working in a madhouse.
While Martha had remained sane, she had also decided to remove herself, washing her hands of the situation, it seemed, ducking out without word at the beginning of every wake. She spent the day outside. A few times at dusk I caught sight of her wandering the woods fringing the far lawns, hauling her black bag, studying the treetops with a pair of binoculars like some professional bird-watcher, or an environmentalist recording evidence of acid rain. She’d fumble in her bag, which looked so heavy I wondered if inside was a copy of the same underground book, The Bend, she’d lugged around Darrow. Instead, she’d remove a thin black notebook and scribble in it for a minute before trudging on. Once, I ran after her.
“Martha!”
She kept walking, pretending she hadn’t heard me.
“Martha! Wait!”
She stopped and turned. I could see she didn’t want to be bothered—certainly not by me.
“I’m worried about them,” I said.
She nodded. “So?”
So? I could only stare at her, rain coursing down my head and arms. Hadn’t she witnessed what was going on? Didn’t she care?
“They’re going crazy. They’re not taking it seriously anymore. I don’t know what to do.”
She shrugged. “It’s all part of the acceptance.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When criminals are sentenced to life in prison, there’s a ninety-four-percent chance of mental collapse within the first year.” She shrugged. “Just leave them alone.”
“No way. We have to stick together.”
To my shock, with another awkward shrug, she began to walk away.
“Where are you going?” I shouted.
She didn’t answer.
“I need your help! Please! Don’t you want to get out of here?”
She held up a hand—a mild gesture of acknowledgment to a child having a tantrum—and kept walking.
We were shipwreck survivors in a raging sea. Now they were forcing me to let go of their hands so they could sink into the waves and drown.
I was going to be stuck here forever.
Here, in the Neverworld, where I’d never grow old.
Never have a family.
Never fall in love.
I was an immortal vampire without any perks. No bewitching beauty, no golden eyes or shimmering skin, no ability to run three hundred miles an hour and flip cars over.
I was a ghost with no haunt. I couldn’t turn TVs to static or swivel porcelain doll heads 360 degrees, causing normal humans to have nervous breakdowns. I couldn’t make toddlers stand in zombie trances in living rooms, captured in shaky found footage in the dead of night.
I was a ticking clock in a timeless world.
Without time, nothing had meaning. Never before had I understood how crucial the passage of time was to caring about something. It gave it an expiry date, a wick, a rush, a burn. Without it, everything sat in place, dumbly waiting.
In my darkest moments I thought of Jim.
I’d come to Wincroft to find out what happened to him. Now even that question, the one I’d spent the past year turning over and over in my mind, shriveled and flattened in the face of the Neverworld, like a little worm on the driveway in the beating sun.
The night of the fight, I’d just returned from the Dreamland. Letting myself into Wincroft, I heard screaming coming from upstairs. I sprinted up the staircase, realizing they’d locked themselves in E.S.S. Burt’s bathroom in the master suite.
I knocked. “Is everything okay?”
There was no answer but snickering.
“It’s almost time for the vote.”
This was met with more laughter.
“Hello?”
The door was flung open. Whitley stood there wearing an oversized red-sequined evening gown. Her eyes were bloodshot and smudged with eyeliner. Kipling was draped like an exhausted panther over the edge of the tub. Cannon was sitting on the counter, bandana tied marine-style around his forehead. It was obvious from their flushed faces—and the array of empty Dom Pérignon bottles scattered across the tiles—that they were wasted.
“Sister Bee, charmed to see you,” Whitley said primly. “We won’t be joining you. Ever.”
“What?”
“We aren’t voting. We’re staying at Wincroft until the end of time. So there.”
She rolled her eyes at the look on my face.
“Oh, God, Bee. Stop mothering everyone. Your good-girl nun act is never getting you chosen. In fact, it’ll be over my maggot-infested body that I ever allow some Mother Teresa type to triumph on to life. No way. It goes against my very life philosophy that one must get filthy to live. You must get down in the dirt or you’ve done nothing.”
“I’m not Mother Teresa. I’m not a nun. I’m not even that good.”