*
The front doors were always locked and the receptionist had to buzz you in, but after 6 o’clock, there was no receptionist, so I had no hope of socially engineering my way inside the front of the building. There was a door at the back for late deliveries, but I had nothing with me which could convincingly be a parcel.
I walked around the building, looking for a way in, and I had nearly made it fully back around to the front when I almost walked into a security guard coming around the corner. I hadn’t known that they patrolled outside the building; maybe they were on a higher alert because they knew I was loose and fully paranoid. I couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away when I saw him, and I leapt deeper into the bushes, landing face down.
The guard shined the beam of his flashlight around me. I knew he couldn’t see me, because it was a thick bush and I was well concealed within it; years of hiding behind or inside bushes had honed my skills so that I invariably selected the best bush on the first leap. However, nobody could have missed the sounds caused by a hundred fallen leaves as my body crushed them, so I knew that presently he would come closer to investigate, and up close even the most well-concealed person trying to look like a bush still looks very much just like a person hiding in a bush.
Mr. Hodge wriggled himself out of my pocket and walked away.
“Mr. Hodge,” I whispered to him, “come back.” But he paid me no attention. He had already moved several inches, and I couldn’t reach for him; if I moved at all in the leaves, even to extend my arm, the noise would surely betray me. If I got caught and had Mr. Hodge with me, at least there was a chance that I would be able to reach Jim inside the hospital and get Mr. Hodge to him. But if Mr. Hodge ran away and I was captured without him, and then I had to tell Jim that it was my fault that his best friend was running wild in the woods instead of safe at home with his brother, I feared for my chances of enlisting Jim’s help.
Mr. Hodge trundled steadily forward, right out into the open. He made a soft rustling noise as he waded through the leaves with his round, low body. He walked out of the bushes and into the beam of the guard’s flashlight. Once he was in the light, he turned toward the guard. Mr. Hodge blinked in a sleepy way, as if surprised by the bright light from the flashlight.
I realized in that moment that Mr. Hodge was a genius. Nobody would suspect a hedgehog of being a malicious intruder. Even though the noise I had made was much larger than the noise a hedgehog could possibly make, his cuteness would make the guard forget about details. He would believe the evidence of his senses: his ears had heard a noise from a bush, and then his eyes had seen a sleepy hedgehog walking out of the bush; ergo, the hedgehog had caused the noise, most likely having fallen from a low branch of the bush where it had been perched, sleeping, until the guard’s own footsteps startled it awake and caused it to tumble down onto the dry leaves below.
The guard took a pack of peanuts from his pocket and threw one to Mr. Hodge. The hedgehog considered the peanut, and then, appearing to accept it as a payment for interrupting his sleep, took the peanut between his front paws and stuffed it into his mouth, then headed back into the woods, slogging through the leaves once again. The guard enjoyed the situation immensely, and continued on his patrol, whistling as he went.
Mr. Hodge returned to the bush, and stood in front of my face. He munched on the peanut, appearing much contented. The small sound of his teeth crunching the peanut was the only sound to be heard. For a while, neither of us moved, and I didn’t speak.
“You don’t have to be so smug about it,” I said to him at last. Then I picked him up, and put him back in my pocket. “And don’t get any crumbs on me, this is my good shirt.”
I watched the building for another hour, establishing the routine of the guard patrolling. He would walk around the building, shining his flashlight to and fro into the woods and into the windows of the building, doing a pretty thorough job of inspecting. He didn’t know that he was up against a master of concealment, though, so I didn’t blame him for not finding me even though he walked past me several times in different places. Once he had gone all the way around the building, he would return through a side door using a key card.
A plan presented itself to me, and I acted upon it without too much time wasted considering whether it was a good plan or not. When the guard made another round, I walked up behind him and pressed my only available weapon against his back.
Unfortunately, Mr. Hodge’s nose didn’t make a very convincing gun barrel, and the guard wasn’t fooled for very long. Fortunately, that was just long enough for me to get the handcuffs off of his belt and cuff him to a tree, and by the time he realized he had been duped, and asked, a bit unsure of himself, “Is your gun a hedgehog?” it was too late. I twirled Mr. Hodge in the air and put him back in my holster. He bit me through my shirt, but the pain and the small amount of lost blood was worth it.
I had come very ill prepared. Luckily, he’d had his own handcuffs, but I had no rope or tape to gag him with. My initial lack of pants coupled with my hiding in the bushes may have given the guard the wrong idea about my intentions, and he seemed frightened as I started to undress him. His fears were soon calmed because I only wanted his clothes to disguise myself as him. His jacket had large pockets in the sides, and I put Mr. Hodge in one of them so he would be out of sight. I took off my shirt and put it on the guard, apologizing that I didn’t have more for him to wear on such a chilly night. Then I used my undershirt to gag him with, so that he wouldn’t be able to shout and alert anyone else to what I was doing.
I waited near the security entrance to see if another guard would come out, if some hidden signal had been sent and an alarm raised. Nobody came. After several minutes, I crept out of the woody shadows, and into the slightly brighter shadows near the hospital wall. I stayed low to the ground and kept an eye out for any cameras that might also be keeping an eye out for me. I made it to the wall and pressed myself flat against it. Then I shuffled along it until I reached the door. I unlocked the door with the key card I had taken from the guard and let myself into the guard room.
Another guard was in there at a desk with an array of monitors showing closed circuit television feeds from around the hospital. Most of them were from inside the hospital, only two showed the outside and both of them were from right at the front entrance, where I had not gone. No cameras watched the sides or the back of the hospital. None of the screens had shown when I ambushed the first guard, and none of them showed him handcuffed to a tree. I reached for the baton in my belt. I would be able to take this second guard completely by surprise.
“Hadley,” he said, turning around and taking me by surprise, “can you cover for me here while I go out? I know it’s not your turn yet, but I need to stretch my legs.” His nose was bandaged, like it had recently been broken by a brick.
“Mm-hmm,” I assented, hoping that was the kind of noise Hadley might make.
“You’re alright, Hadley,” the guard said on his way out the door.
I settled down to watch the cameras while he was away. A few insomniac patients were still awake in the low security wings of the hospital; several sat playing poker, a few others watched television, but most seemed content to wander the empty rooms and halls. In the secure wing, all the doors to the rooms were closed and locked just like they had been when I was behind one of them, and no patients were out in the halls. Nearly half of the cameras all showed the same picture of the secure wing, apparently of the same hallway, which seemed very odd to me, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. The checkpoints between the several wings were manned even this late at night, with a guard located at each one.
I watched the non-secured patients playing poker more closely. As I looked at them more, I didn’t think they were playing poker at all. They whispered to each other, and looked around as if they were afraid of someone hearing, like they were planning something. I zoomed the camera in on them. Then I remembered that I wasn’t actually Hadley, and it wasn?
??t really my responsibility to keep an eye on the patients through the cameras. I zoomed back out to let them carry on with their poker game/devious plan.
There was a computer on the desk, with a database program open on the screen. It was a list of all the patients in the hospital. This was how I would find Jim. I scrolled through the database. I didn’t know his last name, and there were hundreds of patients listed, with about twenty named Jacob, James, or Jimar, all of which could be shortened to Jim. The names were listed in alphabetical order, with the last name first, and down at the H’s, one stuck out. Hodge, James. Jim. Good Lord; he had given his hedgehog the family name. He had probably willed all of his possessions to it as well. I pulled up the extended patient information and saw that he was still in the same non-secure wing I had been in with him before I left. The floor schematic showed that he was still in the same room as well. If I could get to that wing of the hospital, it would be easy enough to find him in his room, shake him awake, and explain to him why I wasn’t crazy and needed his help.
Just below Jim’s name, still among the H’s, I saw an unexpected name which made me push the chair back and stand up, unable to believe it.
Hope, Penelope. She was there, in Maple Ridge, right then. I clicked on her name to get her patient information. She was in the secure wing, and she had been there for ten days, the exact amount of time since I had last been at her house. When I (stupidly) called Dr. Boggs that night to tell him that I believed she wasn’t using her Psylocybin, he must have gone over immediately with a team of his goons and kidnapped her, bringing her back to the hospital but keeping it a secret from her friends and family. If she was still in Maple Ridge and in the secure wing then that meant she wasn’t hurt too badly even with all the blood I had seen in her house, because otherwise she would be in the medical ward.
Now, I had a new priority. I still wanted to get to Jim and give him Mr. Hodge, but Penelope was right there. I had to get to her first. I didn’t know the full internal layout of the hospital but I knew she was probably within two hundred feet of that guard room. It was almost close enough to touch her, providing that I first moved two hundred feet.
I wrote a note for the other guard, ‘gone to the toilet’ so he wouldn’t wonder where I had gone if he came back before me, and stuck it to the screen for him to see. Before I left, I appended ‘(diarrhea)’ to the note, so he would be less likely to ask questions about why Hadley had abandoned his post, or why he was away for so long. Then I went through the interior door, deeper into the hospital.
I learned a long time ago that if you look like you know what you’re doing and where you’re going, people will assume you do. I walked down the hall with firm strides, keeping my eyes ahead mostly but nodding a greeting at any hospital staff I passed. I approached a bathroom and decided to go in; the door was in full view of several of the late night cleaning staff, and it would lend credence to the bathroom note I had left in the guard room.
I came out of the bathroom several minutes later, feeling refreshed, and continued on my way. At the end of the hallway, I followed a sign which pointed me to the secure wing. I could see the checkpoint at the end of that next long hallway; my heart began to beat faster as I approached it, and my legs felt shaky. I was ready to attack the checkpoint guard and beat him into unconsciousness if he challenged my business there – although the closer I got the bigger he looked. In fact, he was huge; he barely fit in the security booth and had the appearance of having been stuffed in there by a machine. I could not turn back; to do so would arouse suspicion. I came near, and he grinned a large, toothy grin, giving me the very uncomfortable feeling that he had plans to eat me.
“Comin’ through, Hadley?” he asked, extending his head up out of his uniform like a massive carnivorous turtle might.
“Mm-hmm,” I replied, with confidence I did not feel. If I went through, then I would be on the same side of the security gate as that monstrosity. He pressed a button, and the gate swung open like the door to a cage.
“Come on in,” he said. With sweat pooling under my collar, I went through. The door shut behind me, but the guard did not come out of his booth. I walked on towards the elevator which would take me to the secure wing.
“Nice beard,” he said to my back.
“Mm,” I agreed, putting as much nonchalance into that small noise as I could manage, but fearing that I had been discovered. Did the real Hadley have a beard? I couldn’t remember, but it was too late for a shave. I went into the elevator and pushed the button to go down. The checkpoint guard continued grinning at me as the doors closed. It was a relief when I no longer had to see his huge mouth, and I felt measurably safer.
The ride down was long, longer even than I remembered from when I was a patient there, when Penelope had given me a ride up and taken me outside so I could see the window to my room and know that I wasn’t actually being kept thousands of feet underground. Penelope had saved me from myself that day, I had been falling apart mentally just like I had worried that the whole foundation of the building was falling apart and would cause me to be crushed under a million tons of dirt. Now I was going to save Penelope from the same place that she had saved me.
I had plenty of time to think on that long ride down. Why was it so important for me to take my Psylocybin that they had gone to such lengths to ensure it, including installing killer cameras in my house? Not just me, but they also wanted to ensure that Penelope was taking it, and they had kidnapped her when she had stopped taking it. I didn’t understand how they thought we could bother them or influence their plans. We had a reputation for being paranoid; nobody would believe us. Besides that, most of the time I was paranoid I felt sure that it wasn’t for anything legitimate, like with the boy on the street, when I had been certain that I was being followed by someone who meant to do me harm but actually it was only a boy playing a game.
It definitely seemed that the Psylocybin was the key to it, though, even if I couldn’t understand why. It was only when the cameras in my house had seen my untaken Psylocybin pills that they turned against me. And it was only when I (stupidly) alerted Dr. Boggs to my suspicions about Penelope not taking her Psylocybin that she was captured. While we were using Psylocybin, we would let anything pass without a word, even things that a regular person would be paranoid about like having cameras installed in their house by someone else. They didn’t seem to care what we did, though, we were allowed to live our lives as normal; other than the cameras there was nothing they did directly to me.
There were other cameras, though, I remembered. There were the cameras recently set up at traffic lights. I had felt safe when I went under them, the opposite reaction to what I would have now if I went under a camera. And they hadn’t been used for just their publicly stated purpose; a woman, Yennifer Stroumph, who had written to the paper to complain had been arrested only days later, caught by the traffic cameras. I wondered if she too suffered from the same paranoia that Penelope and I did, and if she had been falsely arrested. Was there a connection between those cameras and the cameras in my house? Perhaps Ms. Stroumph, too, was in Maple Ridge, being kept from the outside world. I couldn’t figure out why, and my head was full of too many things right then; Penelope was all I could focus on.
The elevator bell dinged, and the doors opened. The hallway was empty, except for me. Upstairs, the floors were hard tile, but down in the secure wing plush carpet covered them. The walls, too, were soft. Some of the patients had self-harming disorders, and so every hard surface had been padded so they didn’t get opportunities.
Penelope was in room 2, one of the first rooms. I had taken a ring of keys from the guard outside, and I went through the ring until I found a key labeled ‘Master.’
I opened the door, expecting to find Penelope lying in bed, and I would rouse her from slumber and tell her that I had come to rescue her. We could kiss deeply – but briefly, there’s no time, my love – and then we would leave Maple Ridge forever, perhaps with me carrying her in my
arms. Instead, I opened the door to a room halfway filled with dirt. The far wall had collapsed inward, and a ton of earth had spilled through, carrying furniture and plaster and padding with it. A wheelbarrow and a shovel sat against the wall, and I could see shovel impressions in the pile of dirt that dominated the room.
I closed the door to give myself a chance to clear my head. I knew I hadn’t really seen it, and I told myself that when I opened the door it would be gone. Then I noticed that beside the ‘2’ on the door there was the outline of ‘0’. The second decal must have fallen off recently and not yet been replaced. This was room 20, my first room in Maple Ridge. I recalled then that I’d had a suspicion that they had moved me to a different room after the incident where I thought the walls were collapsing and my room was going to fill with dirt and kill me.
I opened the door again, and the room was still filled with dirt. It was real. It had really happened. The day which still lived in my memory as one of the most frightening things I had ever experienced was real, even though they had told me it was not. I had been terrified of being buried alive in that room, of a slow suffocation while worms and other underground creatures used my body as a playground. I had been convinced that my fear was false, that my mind was playing cruel tricks on me, and I had been pacified into taking Psylocybin to ‘cure’ myself. I realized that they had tricked me; my mind had not been broken, it had only been warning me. Luckily, I had not died in that room and they had moved me to another, but the collapse I had been terrified of had actually happened.
The dirt filling the room proved another thing as well; I was underground. The elevator was not a slow elevator; it was an elevator travelling at regular speed which took a long time because of the depth it had to cover. Why, though? Why build this single hallway of rooms so far underground?
I closed the door again. It proved that I was right before, that I wasn’t actually crazy, but it didn’t matter right then. Penelope still needed my help. I went down the hallway, which had twenty rooms, numbered from 1 to 21. I used the master key again, and let myself in.
Penelope was sitting on the bed, turned away from the door.
“You can’t keep me here forever,” she said, without looking away from the window where a thin moonlight shone through. Her words were confident, but her tone was defeated, as if she knew that the opposite of what she said was true but that she should say it anyway.
“Penelope, it’s me,” I said.
She jumped off the bed as if propelled by a spring when she heard my voice. Her hands shook. She still didn’t turn around. She seemed afraid to, like I was an illusion which might be dispelled if she looked. Then her shoulders slumped.
“So they’ve got you too, then. But why would they put you in…” her words trailed off, and she turned around at last. I smiled and twirled the ring of keys on my finger.
“How… why…” but she wasn’t able to finish any of her questions. She came and put her arms around me, then kissed me deeply, and not briefly. I didn’t complain – I decided that there was time for it after all.
After a while, I felt my hands moving over her body of their own accord, and I decided there was not time for that. “I’ve come to get you, Penelope,” I said, breaking our kiss.
“There are only a few guards between us and the outside, and I’m sure we can fake some kind of late-night patient transport story for you. We can just go; nobody even knows I’m here.”
When I said that, the radio on my belt crackled, and out came the voice of the guard who had gone outside to stretch his legs. “We have an intruder,” the radio said. “Someone has knocked out Hadley and taken his uniform. He’s inside the complex, but I don’t know where. Stay alert and start a patrol in your zones. Over.”
“I know where he is,” replied the deep voice of the giant guard I had passed before the elevator. “I’ll take care of it. Over and out.”
“Alright, now they know I’m here,” I said.
Even though there was now an urgent reason for us to leave, I first wanted to show her what I had discovered in room 20. The windows in the rooms were hard plastic instead of glass, and the furnishings in the room had been carefully picked so that anything light enough to lift was not solid enough to damage the window. The guard’s truncheon riding on my hip was metal, though. I walked over to the window and smashed it with one blow from the truncheon. The pieces of thick, clouded plastic fell on both sides of the window frame, revealing a single light bulb in a concrete box. It gave off a dim, white light, which through the plastic had appeared to be moonlight.
“These rooms are underground, Penelope,” I said, when I had revealed the deception, “I looked in my old room and it was filled with dirt, just like I had been terrified of that day.”
“I know,” she said.
“You… know? What?”
“After you had that vision of being trapped underground, they changed the lights so they weren’t mimicking the yellow light of the sun all the time. Before you, nobody had ever questioned the bulbs. Now, at night, they look like the moon,” she waved her hand towards the milky bulb, “and sometimes they dim and then brighten again like clouds have gone across.”
“But… you said… you said that it wasn’t underground.” I felt unsteady. “You took me in the elevator. You said there was nothing to worry about. And there really was a collapse in my room, so you moved me to another room. But why are these rooms even down here? It doesn’t make any sense. That’s why I started taking Psylocybin.” I moved away from her, until my back hit the wall. Paranoia saturated my brain. “You’re behind all of it,” I said, in a fit of sudden realization. She was with Ron. She had convinced me to take the RonCorp pills. “Every time I had worries about Psylocybin, you talked me out of them.” I knew I should be leaving, but I felt weak; I couldn’t will my legs to move. “I was in your secret entrance, Penelope, I forced myself into it. Now they’ve used you as bait to get me back here with the faked fight scene at your house, but you don’t even need to be rescued. You’re one of——”
Before I could finish that sentence and tell her I knew she was one of them, the checkpoint guard tore open the door, popping a bolt out of one of the reinforced hinges. His body filled the frame. There was no way around him. They had trapped me again. They would never let me free from Maple Ridge this time. I would never see my family. All my houseplants were going to die. I had been lured into a trap by the first pretty girl who showed an interest in me, and I hadn’t suspected anything. I was a fool. The room swayed around me, and the ceiling suddenly got farther away. My legs had decided that my body wasn’t worth supporting any longer and I fell, hitting my head on the floor.