My unconscious mind is very powerful and it wants me to keep living, I do not tell them.
When we ask Nelson what he did before the sickness, he says that person is gone. Not forgotten—just gone. He picks up a pair of goggles and puts them on, like he’s ready to get to work. He moves with the authority of a person who is used to being in charge of other people, while Darcie has the meek manner of someone who has never known what it’s like to have power over another person and maybe not even over herself.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” I bend down to touch a beaker. The inside is crusted with salt.
“We found it in the basement,” Nelson says. “Has Darcie shown you the basement yet?”
Marcus and I shake our heads.
“Darcie loves the basement,” Nelson says. “That’s where she thinks she can talk to God.”
29.
Our nights are filled with games.
Here are the rules for cops and robbers: the cops cop and the robbers rob. Marcus and I get to play the robbers, which I like. We’re naturals in the role. Have I ever been a natural at anything before? We run away from Darcie and Nelson and the toy gun, screaming. It feels good, all that running and screaming. Sometimes Marcus grabs my hand and I think we’re escaping for real, to a place where we will find my mother. I imagine us running outside and the woods parting and spotting her island among the trees like a pearl in an oyster, waiting to be found.
When we get caught, Darcie and Nelson press us against the wall and twist our arms behind our backs. I taste the chalkiness of the plaster, get dust up my nose. It is the best kind of capture, because nothing happens; there are no consequences for our stealing. No stern warnings, no fines, no jail. We are released into the night, to do it all over again.
Hide-and-go-seek, that’s another one. Darcie always wins hide-and-go-seek. We check every room in the Mansion, all the secret compartments, until we finally give up and tell her to come out. If she doesn’t come out right away, Nelson gets impatient and starts banging around the house, slamming doors, kicking over carpets, tearing up and down the stairs. In the dark, his silver hair glows. He smacks the wall and we hear plaster crumbling. He tells her to come out right fucking now or she can just forget about ever being fully cured.
“I was in the basement,” Darcie always says, even though we’ve already looked down there.
In the Mansion, Marcus and I are starting to become very curious about this basement.
There is no electricity, but there is an oil lamp that we light and carry around with us at night—or rather, Nelson carries it around. “Whoever has the light has the power,” he sings. Sometimes, after the games end, we drink the alcohol Nelson has cooked up in his lab. He says it’s made from yeast and table sugar, but I only know that it sloshes around in a green bottle and burns when I drink it. It smells sweet like the Robitussin and after it goes down, faces turn into bright blurs, like the world is a wet canvas someone can’t stop touching.
In the Mansion, our nights are long. We have started going in reverse: winter is leaving, yet our window of daylight keeps growing smaller. During these windows, we are busy. We are busy stomping through the woods, pulling up dandelion and chickweed and creeping charlie. Thistles with thorny leaves and soft purple flowers. We are busy measuring our water supply. We are busy suffocating cockroaches by coating them with the lye Nelson stores in his lab. The roaches flop over onto their backs, tiny legs kicking. We watch until the kicking stops. We are busy standing in the Dumpster and picking out what the people with means do not want. We go to bed near dawn and wake just before sunset. We are turning nocturnal. We are no longer in sync with the outside world, with the patterns of nature, but aligned with the rhythms of this house.
*
As it turns out, Darcie doesn’t think she can talk to God in the basement.
In the basement, there is a steel door and behind that door, a tunnel. The floor is cool dirt. The walls are dark and smooth. The ceiling is rounded and just high enough to walk upright. You can go thirty steps before the tunnel ends, cut off by a stone wall. The wall is old and the rocks are coming loose. No one knows what’s on the other side. It is in this tunnel that Darcie hears the voice of her mother, who is dead.
I wonder if the people who built this house intended the tunnel to be a safe room or fallout shelter, a place to go when the world ends.
“Dead from the sickness?” I ask Darcie, who shakes her head.
“She died a long time ago.”
She tells me and Marcus about the tunnel in the living room. Nelson is upstairs, working in the attic. We can hear the bowling ball knocking down pins. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Darcie is balled inside the trap door, her chin resting on her knees. Her hair is tucked behind her ears, her roots black and oily. It’s dusk. I look up and see tiny crystalline stars through the skylight.
“How do you do it?” I ask. “How do you hear her?”
She shrugs. Her wings rub the floor.
“It’s private,” she says. “It’s mine.”
“My mother is gone,” I say, choosing to not elaborate on what I mean by gone.
She looks at us. She chews her upper lip.
“His too,” I add, nodding at Marcus.
“Like I said, it’s my tunnel.” Darcie sniffs. “Besides, it’s not as simple as walking in and saying hello. There’s an entire ritual.”
“We can learn,” I tell her.
“You can watch.” She pauses, looks across the room. “And that’s as close as you’re going to get.”