Dark Eden by Patrick Carman Page A

like?” I asked instead.
    “Who?”
    “You know, the main guy Dr. Stevens told us about. The doctor.”
    “He’s not what I expected,” she pondered. “I mean, he’s fine. I actually think you’d like him.”
    “Really?”
    “He came up those stairs after Mrs. Goring left, that part was kind of weird.”
    Marisa pointed to a set of stairs—I could only see the first two steps. They were in the middle of the room, going down into black. “Even Kate was scared when he first showed up. You know how there are all those old movies where a beautiful girl comes down the stairs in her prom dress or whatever? This was like the opposite. It was like he came up out of the ground.”
    “I thought you said I’d like him.”
    “You would. After that he came to the table and told us all to sit down. Then he said his name was Rainsford, but more than that. He was like, ‘ You will be tempted to call me many things—Doctor, Mister, Sir, the old man of the house. Please, just Rainsford. ’ After that it was cool. Just hearing his voice made us all like him.”
    Until he killed Ben Dugan, I wanted to say.
    “What then, after that?”
    “You’ve got a lot of questions.”
    “It’s boring in the basement.”
    “Then come back. He asked about you.”
    She leaned a little closer; her brown eyes turned black in the darkness. “I think he can help us.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Because. He cured Ben. This guy is for real.”
    “Cured Ben? But that’s not what happened. Ben’s dead.”
    Marisa pulled back, as if the scared little dog she’d coaxed out of the wild was about to bite her.
    “Ben’s not dead. He’s fine.”
    She pointed to the middle door on the far wall, the one between the rooms for the girls and the boys. “He went through that door; and when he came back, he wasn’t afraid anymore.”
    She looked at me warily, as if she wasn’t sure I could be trusted. “What are you not telling me?”
    I took another drink of water and felt my throat struggle to choke it down. This wasn’t going the way I’d imagined it. I barely knew Marisa. What if she’d been turned against me in my absence? So it surprised me when I revealed so much, so quickly.
    “I found a room downstairs, in the basement of Mrs. Goring’s place. It’s an old bomb shelter, or maybe it’s like one of those places you go so you can see what the enemy’s doing when they show up and take over a fort. You know, to plan a counterattack or something.”
    Marisa had moved as far away from me as she could without falling off the couch. She was looking at me, figuring things out. She was a real thinker, this girl.
    “Are you watching us, Will?”
    I paused, a feeling in my gut that I’d said more than I should have.
    “It’s not like I found it on purpose or anything. The monitors were just there . And anyway, I can’t see hardly anything.”
    Marisa didn’t speak, so I charged ahead. “This big room with the table, I can see it sometimes. And there are two other rooms; they’re like confessionals or something. And the room Ben went into. I saw where he went, and it’s not what you think. I thought he was dead.”
    Marisa stared at me for a long time: ten seconds, maybe more.
    “What did you see?” she finally asked.
    I told her about the helmet and the creepy blue walls, but I stopped short of describing the bizarre images that filled the screen.
    Marisa shook her head. “All I know is that when he came back, he wasn’t afraid of bugs and spiders anymore. But that is a little creepy, the helmet thing. I wonder what it does?”
    Part of me wanted to yell, It scares you to death! But there was another part that said, Don’t do it; leave it alone . I was starting to doubt myself. Ben Dugan wasn’t dead; and what was more, he was cured, or at least Marisa believed he was. Ben Dugan wasn’t afraid anymore. I envied him that, and I knew what Marisa feared. If she understood that the treatment would put her face-to-face with