The Seeds of Wither (The Chemical Garden #1.5) Page 12
Author: Lauren DeStefano

“It’s all right,” he says. “They’ll think I got held up catering to Cecily.” Sassy, demanding little Cecily is quickly taking Rose’s place among the help as least favorite wife. Gabriel and I sit cross-legged on the floor, and he waits patiently for me to stop hiccupping so I can speak.

It’s nice in the elevator. The carpet is worn but clean. The walls are cranberry red, inlaid with Victorian patterns that make me think of my parents’ bedspread, how protected I felt inside of it. Distantly my mind registers the memory of that long-gone security. I’m safe here, too. Somewhere in the back of my mind I wonder if these walls have ears—if at any moment Housemaster Vaughn’s voice will come booming through an overhead speaker, threatening Gabriel for allowing me to make it this far. But I wait, and no voice comes, and I’m so upset that I’m beyond caring anyway.

“I have a brother,” I say, starting at the beginning. “Rowan. When our parents died four years ago, we had to leave school and find jobs. It was easy for him to find factory work that paid well. But I had so little skill, I was practically useless. He didn’t think it was safe for me to go out alone, so we tried to stay near each other, and I always wound up with phone jobs in the factories that paid next to nothing. We had enough to get by, but not the way we used to, you know? I wanted to do more.

“A few weeks ago I saw an ad in the paper, offering money for bone marrow. Supposedly they were conducting a new screening for causes of the virus.” I turn the handkerchief in my hands, studying it through unreliable vision. In one corner there’s a crimson embroidery of what appears to be a flower, but it’s unlike any I’ve ever seen, with an abundance of spear-shaped petals crowded together. It blurs and doubles. I shake my head to clear my vision.

“I realized it was a trap as soon as I stepped inside the lab and saw all those other girls,” I say, my fingers automatically curling like claws. “I fought. I scratched, bit, kicked. It didn’t matter. They herded all of us into a van. And I don’t know how long we were riding. Hours. Sometimes we’d stop, the doors would open, and more girls would come in. It was so awful in there.”

I remember that blackness. There were no walls, there was no up or down. I could have been living or dead. I listened to the other girls as they breathed around me, above me, inside me, and that was the whole planet earth. Just those terrified hiccups of breath. I thought I’d gone mad. And maybe I am mad, because I think I hear one of the Gatherer’s bullets now, and I jump. Sparks fly around me.

Gabriel raises his head just as the lights begin to flicker. There’s another loud boom, not a gunshot but something mechanical-sounding. Our car begins to shake, and then the doors slide open, and Gabriel is tugging me to my feet and we’re hurrying into the hallway. But it’s not the cooks’ hallway. This one is darker and sterile-smelling. Neon lights are struggling on the ceiling, and in the floor tiles I can see the dim reflection of our shoes before each step lands.

“We must’ve gone down a floor,” Gabriel says.

“What? Why?” I say.

“Storm,” he says. “Sometimes the elevators all move to the basement as a precaution.”

“Storm? It was sunny outside just a minute ago,” I say, relieved to find the fear isn’t present in my voice. The sobs have stopped too, leaving only the soft, infrequent hiccups in the aftermath.

“We get a lot of them on the coastline,” he says. “Out of nowhere sometimes. Don’t worry, if it was a hurricane, we would have heard the alarm. It’s not uncommon for strong winds to mess with the electricity and take out one of the elevators.”

Hurricane. From somewhere deep in my mind comes a television image of wind spinning angrily, destroying houses. It’s always the houses that go, sometimes bits of a fence or an uprooted tree, a shrieking her**ne in a prairie dress, but always the houses. I imagine a hurricane smashing into this mansion and tearing it apart. I wonder if I’d be able to escape then.

“So this is the basement?” I say.

“I think so,” Gabriel says. “I mean, I’ve never been down this way. I’ve only been to where the storm shelter is. Nobody’s allowed without authorization from Housemaster Vaughn.” He looks nervous, and I know Housemaster Vaughn is the reason. I can’t stand the thought of Gabriel limping to my room, melancholy and bruised because of my transgressions.

“Let’s go back up before anyone catches us,” I say.

He nods. The elevator doors have closed, though, and they don’t open when he swipes his key card across the panel. He tries several times before shaking his head. “It’s not working,” he says. “It’ll be back up eventually, but in the meantime, there’s got to be another elevator we can try.”

We begin walking down this long hallway, with unreliable lighting that cuts out at times and hisses at us. The main hallway branches off to other, darker hallways and closed doors, and I’m sure I don’t want to know where they lead. I never want to see this floor again. It’s triggering something very bad in my memories, in the place of nightmares, where the murdered girls in the van reside, where the Gatherer thief cups his hand over my mouth and presses a blade to my throat. Something about being here makes my palms sweat. And then I realize it. This is where the doctor was, the afternoon before the wedding. Deirdre brought me to this hallway, led me to a room where a man stuck me with a needle and I blacked out.

My skin becomes gooseflesh at the memory. I need to get out of here.

Beside me Gabriel presses forward without looking at me. “About what you told me,” he says in a low voice, “I think it’s terrible. And what you said earlier, about hating this place? I understand.”

I’ll bet he understands.

“It’s Housemaster Vaughn, isn’t it?” I say. “He’s the one that hurt you? It was my fault, because I got out of my room.”

“You shouldn’t have been locked in a room to begin with,” he says.

I realize all at once that I want to know him. That I’ve begun to see his blue eyes and coppery brown hair as the signs of a friend, and have for a while now. I like that we’re speaking, finally, about things more important than what’s for lunch or what I’m reading or if I want some lemons with my tea. (I never do.)

I want to know more about him, and I want to tell him more about myself. My real, unmarried self, my self from before I ever saw the inside of this mansion—when I lived in a dangerous place but I had my freedom and I was happy with it. I open my mouth, but immediately he stops me by grabbing my arm and yanking me into one of the dark side hallways. I don’t have a chance to protest before I hear the clatter of something approaching.

We press ourselves against the wall. We try to be the shadows that cover us. We will the whites of our eyes to be dim.

There are voices getting closer. “—cremation isn’t possible, of course—”

“Shame to destroy that poor girl.” A sigh; a tsk tsk.

“It’s for the greater good, if it will save lives.”

The voices are unfamiliar. If I spent the rest of my life in this house, I might never know all its rooms, all the attendants. But as the voices approach, I can see that the people aren’t dressed like attendants. They are dressed in white, their heads protected by the same white hoods that my parents wore to work, with plastic covering their faces. Biohazard suits. They’re wheeling a cart.

Gabriel grabs my wrist, squeezes it, and I don’t understand why. I don’t understand what’s happening at all until the cart gets closer to us and I can see what’s on it.

A body covered by a sheet. Rose’s blond hair trailing out around the edges. And her cold, white hand, with fingernails still painted pink.