IT’S LIKE IT WAS BEFORE. I’M STANDING IN PITCH-BLACKNESS. But it’s different from mere blackness—it is the absence of light, sound, feeling, any sensation at all. I’m completely alone in the dark, my heart beating a million miles an hour, my breath ragged, pressure making my head feel like it’s a balloon that’s about to explode.
Now that I’m out of the cave, I’m suddenly overwhelmed with the horror of it. The slime, the pain, the hideous blue creature lying at my feet with its brains bashed in. Panic and nausea come in waves, crippling me, bending me over as I lock my arms across my middle. My body wants to throw up, but nothing comes out as I crouch down and heave over and over, my stomach cramping worse each time.
The nausea finally subsides, and I sit down, leaning forward, my head in my hands. Where am I? I feel like crying, but I stopped doing that years ago and don’t even remember how.
And then I hear something. The same rhythmic tapping I heard the first time I was here. Four taps. A pause, and then four taps again. My heart shoots to my throat. Is it one of the blue creatures? Or what about that thing at the end, walking on water and flickering like a dying candle? Could it have followed me through the black hole into the darkness? Or does this place have its own monsters?
I sit motionless, too petrified to move, until finally I can’t stand the silence any longer. “Is anyone else here?” My voice comes out all wobbly with fear.
There is one silent second. From a ways away, a voice sounding a hundred percent human says, “Yes.”
And then, coming from closer, is a voice I recognize. “Cata, is that you?” It’s the boy from the cave. Fergus.
“Yes, it’s me,” I respond, scrambling to my feet and groping, hands held up in front of me, toward his voice.
“Over here,” he says. I reach forward and grab an arm. We fumble around until I’m clenching his hand in one of mine and clamping his arm in a death grip with the other. Just having that contact, that support, makes me dizzy with relief.
“Are you okay?” His voice is low. Calm.
“I think so,” I whisper back.
“I wish there were light,” says a small voice, and as soon as the words are spoken, the place is flooded with light. It’s not blinding, but I shade my eyes while they adjust. The pervasive glow illuminates the space we’re standing in—a space with no visible ceiling or walls, or even shadows. Just a sort of blank whiteness as far as I can see. Fergus stands beside me, and now that we are visible we drop hands.
I finally get a good look at him, slime-free, and get that feeling again like I know him from somewhere else. Somewhere outside this place. He’s really tall and has chin-length ink-black hair, jade-green eyes, and his skin is the same light brown as mine. He’s handsome in a skater-boy kind of way, although judging from his super-serious look, I’m sure he’d hate that description.
Skater-boy. Something tugs at my memory, but evaporates as soon as I pay attention to it.
There are other people in the space at varying distances from us. Some sit, some stand—all facing different directions. BethAnn scrambles to her feet, wiping tears from her cheeks. Her face is splotchy and her too-big-for-her-face blue eyes are bloodshot and swollen.
The others turn to face us. I recognize them from the cave. We walk toward each other until we’re standing in an awkward circle, but no one says a word until BethAnn speaks up. Her voice is barely a whisper, but it’s so quiet in the space that I can hear every word. “Are you all real?” she asks, and you can tell she’s hoping we’ll say no. That we’re just characters in a dream and she’ll wake up soon.
“About as real as you are, I expect,” says one of the boys from the cave. Is he being snarky? But no . . . when I look at him, he has a flirty smile on his face. “After what’s just happened, who knows what’s real anymore?” he says and, reaching out, squeezes BethAnn’s shoulder. She relaxes and gives him a shy smile.
The boy is almost as tall as Fergus, and has chestnut-brown hair, thick eyebrows, and piercing blue eyes. He looks a lot like that actor . . . the one from that zombie love film . . . I can’t remember his name.
“Does anyone have any idea where we are?” I ask. People shake their heads.
“I’ve been here before,” says a voice from behind me. I jump as a girl with a milky complexion, black shoulder-length hair, and straight bangs walks up and joins us. She’s dressed in a black band T-shirt, a short plaid miniskirt, and fluorescent yellow tights and wears catlike eyeliner. I saw her in the cave—crouching next to the injured boy. “But last time it stayed dark.”
“Same with me,” says a small, wiry boy with dark skin and a foreign accent that sounds vaguely African. “I was here in the dark right before getting sucked through that door into the cave.”
“Me too,” says Fergus. “But before this . . . void . . . I was somewhere else. I think it was a dream . . . Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s a nightmare I’ve had before. But at the end of it, something changed and I saw a few of you.”
Everyone nods like the same thing happened to them.
“I know I saw you,” Actor Guy says to Fergus. “And you too, I think,” he says to BethAnn. “I saw you standing next to a swimming pool.” The way he looks at her, he seems to be implying something, like he’s protecting her from us by not mentioning the floating body I saw myself. BethAnn pales.
“Anyone else have the same experience?” Cat Eyes asks.
We all nod, and Actor Guy says, “Yeah, but I don’t remember seeing you there . . . in that first place.”
“Well, I saw you,” she said. “You were in a basement or a storage space or something with lots of doors.”
Actor Guy looks uncomfortable. He was obviously as freaked out by his nightmare as the rest of us.
She turns to the rest of us, and says in an authoritative voice, “So we were all having our own nightmares, and at the end some of us saw each other, and then we came here to this”—she glances at Fergus and uses air quotes, flashing a yin-yang tattoo on her wrist—“‘void-y’ place before getting sucked into that nightmare of a creepy cave.”
This girl sounds like she’s used to organizing people. Confident. Self-assured. And tough enough to be a little bit scary.
“If nightmare’s even the right word for it,” Actor Guy says. “I’ve never had a bad dream as realistic as that.”
“Well, dream or not, it definitely wasn’t real, because Ant there”—Cat Eyes points at a boy wearing fingerless gloves and one of those South American knitted hats with earflaps—“had blood gushing from a slime monster bite, and now that we’re in . . . the Void . . .” she says, considering the name she just gave this place and then nodding, satisfied, “. . . well, look.”
Everyone turns to look at “Ant,” who wears shorts along with his matching knitwear. He was the one sprawled on the ground in the cave, injured. Now his leg is bite-free. He diverts his eyes, obviously not enjoying the attention.
“Cata cut her chin pretty bad,” says BethAnn, glancing at me. I press my fingers to it to check—no blood. I look down. The holes are gone from the knees of my jeans, which look like they just came out of the washing machine. And the shoes I kicked off to swim are back on my feet.
“We were all soaked with that green phlegm from the snot lake,” comments Actor Guy. He gestures toward his jeans, which look off-the-shelf new.
Cat Eyes pinches her chin, thinking. “Individual dream, Void, collective dream, Void,” she says to herself. She turns to Fergus and me, and glances over at BethAnn. “By the way, the rest of us already met in the cave. I’m George.”
“George?” BethAnn blurts out, and then looks embarrassed.
“Short for Georgina,” George says. “Got a problem with it?”
BethAnn’s eyes get deer-in-headlights wide. She presses her lips together and shakes her head.
Everyone else gives their name except the foreign guy, who looks totally stressed out. “Are we really going to stand around getting to know each other, or are we going to figure out how to get out of here? Not to be rude, but I hope not to stay long enough to get acquainted.”
When he speaks, it sounds like he’s singing. Although his English is perfect, the accents are on all the wrong syllables, and I have to concentrate to understand.
“So where exactly are you going, Remi?” asks George. One hand is poised on her hip and the other tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I can’t wait to hear your escape plan.”
“I just don’t see the point in wasting time making friends. I mean, she isn’t even sure if we’re real.” His melodic accent doesn’t hide the emotion in his words. I’m sure we’re all scared here, but he seems downright shell-shocked.
“My name is BethAnn,” she responds.
Remi just peers around the space, as if hoping another door is going to appear.
“Listen, Remi,” George says. “I saved your ass from those monsters back there. If we’re stuck going back and forth between this Void and those dreams, you might want to know whose name to scream next time you need to be rescued.”
“It’s not my fault I fell,” he mumbles. Humiliated, he glances apologetically at BethAnn, who refuses to meet his gaze.
Fergus watches George’s badassedness with admiration, while Zombie Actor, who introduced himself as Sinclair, stifles a laugh at Remi’s embarrassment.
“Based on what went down in the cave, I wouldn’t mess with George,” he says, throwing her a look of complicity. “If you’re smart, you’ll join her team instead of trying to come up with your own plan.”
He throws her a flirty wink and she frowns. “Think you might want to bring it down a notch? You already came on to me in the slime cave. Unsuccessfully.”
Sinclair throws his hands up in innocence. “Whoa, whoa, whoa . . . I never came on to anyone. I was just being friendly.” But the look he gives her is full-on flirtatious.
She crosses her arms. “Not interested,” she says dryly.
His smile spreads, and he mimics her arm cross. “Not trying,” he responds, clearly relishing the drama.
I butt in. “Um, can we skip the lovers’ spat and talk about what’s going on? We have no clue where we are. But it might help if we figured out how we got here.”
BethAnn starts to say something, and then stops, looking unsure.
“What, BethAnn?” George prods.
“The whole time I’ve been here in”—she pauses—“what did you call it? The Void? I’ve been trying to think back to before the first nightmare—to what I did last night before going to bed. But I’m drawing a total blank.”
Everyone shuts up, and you can tell we’re racking our brains, trying to remember. I can’t recall what I did last night either, but how about yesterday? With an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, I realize I can’t remember anything before waking up in the Flayed Man dream. I dig deeper.
Okay, I remember being taken away from home, of course. Moving in with Barbara. Too panicky to leave the house, I binge-watched DVDs for a couple of months before she insisted on enrolling me in a homeschooling program. But I can’t really place how long ago that was. It feels like it could have been years ago . . . or yesterday.
George breaks the silence. “Does anyone remember what happened before that first dream? Like BethAnn said . . . where you were last night . . . what you were doing?”
There is a group shaking of heads. Worried looks.
Fergus chimes in. “Anyone know what day it is?” he asks. “Month?”
Collective silence.
Ant speaks up, his voice almost a whisper. “The last thing I remember is Christmas.”
“I remember New Year’s Eve,” offers Sinclair with an inside-joke wag of the eyebrows—like . . . if we only knew the things he had done.
“Okay, so we’re at least post–January first,” Fergus says, picking up from Sinclair. “Anyone remember something later than that?”
The homeschool program began in December. I remember the geeky grad student Barbara found to tutor me during the first few weeks. Then . . . nothing. So I’m up to January. I shake my head, and so do BethAnn and George.
Remi speaks up, offering his story with a sigh, like he thinks this exercise is a waste of time. “I moved to America on February fifth. I remember that day and starting school the next week. I don’t remember anything after that.”
“So we all have memory loss,” murmurs George.
Ant takes that as his cue to sit down. He begins tapping the floor with his finger. Tap tap tap tap. Tap tap tap tap.
Oh my God. It’s the sound I heard in the Void the first time, and again before the lights came on! The one that scared me half to death. There’s something about it that puts me on edge. I shudder.
Sinclair looks at me and, in a low voice, as if he’s taking me into confidence, he says, “He kept doing that in the cave, and it nearly got him eaten.” He leans toward me as he speaks, brushing my arm with his.
Wow, this guy is definitely a flirt. But it doesn’t really bother me. It’s been a long time since I even thought about boys, and it’s actually nice to get the attention.
I make myself turn away from him and watch George sit down next to the boy. “Ant’s just nervous,” she says, and puts her hand on his arm.
Remi fidgets impatiently. “Ten minutes in the cave and they’re already best friends. Our goal is to get out of here. Not to pamper this kid who acts like he’s autistic.”
Ant looks up at him and tips his head to one side, the squint of his eyes showing frustration, not the hurt you would expect to see after that kind of comment. “I’m not autistic,” he says in a small voice.
George looks up and gives Remi a sour face. “You might not care about political correctness, but there is this thing called basic human decency. Oh, yeah, and another thing called Don’t put people in a fucking box.”
Remi shakes his head and mutters some words under his breath. I catch foolish and irresponsible. After that I ignore him and, following George’s example, sit down. One by one, so does everyone else. It feels a lot more natural than standing around in a circle.
Fergus sits a couple of feet away from me and rubs his forearm, staring at this tattoo he’s got, before he looks up and around the at group. “So why are we here? It seems like we’ve all got memory loss back to a certain point. Does anyone know each other? I mean . . . in real life?”
Everyone shakes their heads. BethAnn says, “No, but I have a feeling I’ve seen a couple of you before. You seem familiar,” she says to Ant. “And you.” She nods at Remi. “But it’s supervague. It could just be when we saw each other at the end of the first dream.” She looks troubled, like she’s reaching for something that’s just beyond her grasp.
“Well, what do we have in common, then?” I ask. “We’re all teenagers . . . I think. I mean, I’m sixteen.”
“Eighteen,” says Fergus, and everyone else chimes in.
BethAnn’s the oldest at nineteen. Ant’s the youngest at thirteen. Remi and George are both fifteen, and Sinclair is seventeen.
“Where’s everyone from?” George asks. Everyone answers different states, except Remi, who says he’s from Matangwe, and when that gets blank stares, he huffs, “That’s in Africa. But I live with my aunt now in Minneapolis.”
“Okay, we’re all teenagers who currently live in the United States, and we all have memory loss. I doubt that information’s going to get us very far,” Fergus says. He looks disappointed, like he had hoped we were on to something.
“And the first thing we remember is a nightmare,” says George.
“You mean the last thing,” Fergus corrects her.
“The first,” Ant insists quietly. He is pressing his fingers to his wrist like he’s taking his pulse. Then, letting go, he taps four times on the ground and says to himself, “When working with an unknown situation, you have to identify known factors and work within their boundaries.”
Everyone looks at each other in confusion.
“I think what Ant means,” says George, “is that while we’re here we’ve got to play by the rules of this world.”
“See what I mean?” Remi says. “These two are already practically finishing each other’s sentences. This is not the time to make friends, and it’s not the time to philosophize. It’s the time to strategize.” He plants his gaze on George, challenging her to respond.
George looks at him like he’s barely worth her time. “I think we’ve established that until we know more, it’s going to be kind of hard to come up with a plan.”
I shift uncomfortably, watching the stare-down between George and Remi. Conflict pushes all my buttons—I avoid it at all costs. BethAnn doesn’t seem to be enjoying it either. She’s sitting there with her arms around her legs, enveloping her undernourished frame like she’s hiding a secret. Anorexia, I think. A girl in my old school had it, and she was always trying to hide beneath oversized tops because, even though she was skeletal, she thought she looked fat.
“Clothes.” The word is out of my mouth before I know what I’m going to say. I think for a second. “Our clothes. They were wet and slimy before, like Sinclair said. And my jeans were torn. And before that, in my first nightmare I was wearing a . . .” I hesitate, but Fergus jumps in.
“You were in a white nightgown,” he says, remembering.
“How Gothic romance of you,” Sinclair remarks teasingly. He winks, and I can’t help blushing.
“Cata has a point,” George says. “If we’re in a dream—”
“But we’re not in a dream,” BethAnn interrupts. “We’re actually having a conversation.” She tugs on her long, limp hair. “Everything feels as real as in the outside world.”
“You just said it right there,” George says, pointing to BethAnn. “Outside world.” She looks around at us. “Whether this right now is a dream or not, it doesn’t matter. We’re no longer in the ‘outside world.’ We’re somewhere else.”
“A place where nightmares are always around the corner,” says Sinclair spookily, waving his fingers.
“If only they were just around the corner, and not through a creepy glowing door,” I say.
“Void. Nightmare . . .” murmurs Ant, tapping the ground.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Remi says, squeezing his forehead in frustration.
“Listen, you guys,” BethAnn says, “picking on each other isn’t going to help anything. We need to work as a group if we’re going to figure this out.”
“Nineteen,” says Ant.
Everyone stops and stares at the boy. “What?” asks Remi incredulously.
“Nineteen,” he repeats, in a small firm voice.
And just then, in the center of the circle we’ve all formed, a wooden door appears, its edges glowing blue. A knocking sound booms from somewhere high above us.
“Not again,” BethAnn says.
We scramble to our feet, all except for Ant. He buries his head in his arms, and George squats down to hug him, cocooning him with her body.
A second boom comes. The door slowly creaks open, and wind begins to whip around us.
“I don’t want to go back in,” BethAnn says, shrinking back from the glowing opening.
Fergus puts his arm around BethAnn. “We survived the last one. We can do this thing,” I hear him murmur.
“It’s always three knocks,” says Sinclair. “I for one am not going without a fight.” Bouncing up on his toes, he sprints away from the door into the whiteness, putting as much distance as he can between himself and us.
The third boom comes, and a bright light flashes. I feel myself being whisked up into the air and through the door. The force rips the breath from my lungs and makes my head feel like it’s blowing up like a balloon. And for the second time, I am leaving the Void for who knows where.