Chapter Twenty-Six
Diana’s heart was banging in her chest and sweat prickled across her shoulders and neck. Fortunately, the flashlight seemed to grow brighter as she and Jake penetrated deeper into the building’s basement corridor. The floor ramped upward and the rectangle of light—the doorway to the outside world—receded behind them.
Diana remembered following Jake and Daniel through a dark Swiss railway tunnel, a shortcut to the base of Waterfall Pitch that Daniel had discovered researching the climb on the Internet. As Jake’s flashlight beam played across boarded-over windows and whitewashed cement walls covered with mold, she remembered how the lights of their helmet lamps had bobbed on the ground in front of them.
She’d been crazed eight hours later when she’d raced back alone through that same tunnel, desperate to find rescuers in time to save Daniel, terrified when she’d heard a rumble and seen the headlight of a fast-approaching train. Only just in time she’d found a recess in the tunnel wall. She’d clung there, screaming, as train cars roared past.
Afterward, in the heavy silence of the empty tunnel, she’d felt the first stirrings of that feeling of utter helplessness. That feeling had still been with her a week later when she’d reluctantly boarded an airplane for home. She’d sat in a window seat, clutching the armrest on the American Airlines flight from Zurich to Boston. When the flight attendant announced that the doors were closed, she’d begun to sweat.
“I want to get out,” she’d whispered to Jake. He’d held her hand, told her not to worry. “No!” She’d pulled free and pressed the flight attendant call button. “I need to get out now!”
Passengers across the aisle had given them uneasy glances. When the flight attendant came to see what was wrong, Jake reassured her and by then Diana had managed to regain a semblance of calm. But when the plane started down the runway, her heart had begun to race. Her throat went so dry she couldn’t swallow. As the plane had gained altitude, she’d sat there rigid, unable to breathe, imagining the engine stalling. In her mind’s eye she’d seen the plane dropping like a rock, slamming into the ground, shattering like glass and spewing bodies.
“You feel out of control,” Dr. Lightfoot had explained weeks later. “Anxiety is your body’s natural response to danger. But now you’re becoming conditioned to respond this way even when there’s no real reason to be anxious.”
It had been one of their first Skype video call sessions over the computer, and Dr. Lightfoot’s quiet voice and compassionate expression had calmed her. Now she shuddered at the thought that someone might have been listening in, hearing everything she said and reading everything she typed into her computer.
Dr. Lightfoot had said, “You can’t always stop yourself from losing it, but you’re a very logical person. In some situations, recognizing what’s happening and analyzing the situation may help you maintain control.”
Dr. Lightfoot had been right. Logical analysis helped.
Now Diana tried to build a map in her mind of the mazelike path they’d followed as Jake guided her through the dark corridors that snaked through the basement of the old mill. As he led her through yet another passageway and up a stairway, she visualized the schematic she’d make to replicate this place in OtherWorld. In it, she envisioned two yellow dots—her own and Jake’s—climbing the stairs. She’d feel calmer still if she knew where other yellow dots were lurking in the complex.
They emerged onto a landing. Jake held open a door to a stairwell so Diana could continue up. He kept a firm grip on her arm. After two flights, the stairs ended at an open metal door. She stepped through into a vast space, an entire floor of the mill building.
Jake closed the door and bolted it shut. Then he punched some numbers into a keypad mounted on the wall. A light on it began to blink yellow, and she heard a metallic click as the door locked. The light turned to a steady red. The door at the opposite end of the floor was closed, its keypad light red too.
She was locked in. Diana touched her jacket pockets. The GPS was in one, the cell phone in the other. Either of them would be able to pinpoint her location.
“What have you got in there?” Jake asked.
Diana reached into one of the pockets and pulled out her pills. She offered the container to Jake. He read the prescription label. “I didn’t know you still needed these.” He handed it back to her.
“So now you do.” She shook some pills out into her palm. Jake watched as she placed one on the back of her tongue and swallowed. “Not everyone just bounces back the way you did.”
“I . . .” He looked back at her, tense and tentative. Off balance. He watched as Diana poured the remaining pills back into the container and closed the lid. Then he seemed to shake himself out of it. Maybe she had some advantage—one that she had yet to understand.
Diana tried to focus on the space around her. Pipes and conduits crisscrossed overhead. The center of the floor was stacked with hulking pieces of rusted machinery along with a pile of defunct sinks and toilets.
The outside wall was a massive bank of multipaned windows. From the sound of rushing water, she wondered if she was near where she’d seen the cascade of water over the dam alongside the building. Rain pattered on the roof and rivulets dripped down the windows.
The far corner of the loft had been screened off with sheets of wallboard set into hinged wooden frames. Jake dropped her arm and Diana approached the sheltered area. She came to a halt when she saw what was beyond the wallboard screens. There was her four-poster Shaker-style bed, the one she and Daniel had bought together. It was made up with her own flowered sheets and white down comforter. In the high-ceilinged space, the bed looked like a piece of doll furniture. Next to it, on her grandmother’s bedside table with its serpentine carved legs, was a vase containing a lavish burst of red roses. Jake tossed her backpack on the bed.
She stood there, stunned and shaking with mute fury. Jake had lured her out, invaded her home, and moved the furniture that he knew meant the most to her. She approached an unfinished bookcase that wasn’t hers. The clothes neatly folded on its shelves were.
“Just because my things are here doesn’t make it home,” she said.
That’s when she noticed a metal rack, standing in the corner. An empty plastic pouch hung from it, upside down. She went over to it and lifted the plastic tubing attached to the pouch. A spicy licorice smell filled her head and she remembered the tender spot on the back of Ashley’s hand.
“What did you do to her?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“Four days of nothing?”
“Just kept her quiet. Even you admit that’s an improvement.”
He could be such a smug bastard. “Why?”
“It was”—there was a pause, like Jake was carefully picking the word—“a mistake. A complication I didn’t anticipate.”
“She’s not a complication? She’s my sister.”
“I know, I know. But I thought . . . I didn’t realize . . . she looked just like—”
“Me.” Diana finished the thought. She closed her eyes and let the realization sink in. This was her fault. She’d known that if she let her guard down, something terrible would happen. And then, without thinking, she’d dressed Ashley up as Nadia and launched her into a world that she knew was too dangerous to set foot in.
“Why can’t she remember anything?” Diana asked.
“Rohypnol. It’s a sedative that prevents memories from forming.”
“I know what it is. You just happened to have it on you? Were you going to use that on me if I’d been there and didn’t toddle along with you?”
He didn’t bother to reply, and in his silence, the enormity of what he’d done sank in. “You kept my sister unconscious for four days?”
“I didn’t want to hurt her, but it took me a while to figure out a way to get her home.”
The hospital release forms. That explained the odd assortment of tests that never would have been run, the prescription with Pam’s signature forged on it.
“So Pam doesn’t have anything to do with this, does she?” Diana asked.
Jake dismissed the question with a pitying look.
Diana shivered. It had been such a practical solution, warehousing a human being until Jake had figured out how to throw her back. She scanned the walls and ceiling. Mounted in the corner she found what she was looking for, a pinpoint of red light. She waved at it.
“So where’s Big Brother?” she asked.
“Exactly. That’s why you’re here,” Jake said.