Gradually, as they walked along on a second floor level, 3 had turned oddly melancholy and philosophical, and she murmured, “Who knows what they used to do here? People worked here for years, and laughed together, and got excited if their friend was going to get married or have a baby, and they all looked forward to Christmas and vacations. Maybe old people came here to live the end of their lives, and lay here feeling lonely and helpless and neglected. There had to be so many people in these rooms doing this or that or whatever, and now maybe everyone who ever worked or lived here is dead. All gone now.”
They continued along until they came to a staircase, and without needing to consult each other ascended it together, though 2 glanced sideways at 3, wary of her sulky mood.
“Wow,” he said when they arrived at the top of the stairs, now looking down a broad hallway with large composite windows on either side, its ceiling and walls flaking away and the floor covered in these fallen flakes, like a carpet of autumn leaves. The plaster under the paint was crumbling, and radiators against the walls here and there encrusted with rust. “I feel like I could get lockjaw just breathing the air in here.”
In their wandering they had passed into a structure that appeared to be situated halfway between the building that served as their base camp, and the old brick building directly across from it — though it was hard to tell exactly where one of the buildings in this complex ended and another began. Were they discrete buildings, after all, or just wings of a single building, like the limbs of one great body?
At the far end of the corridor was a door painted emerald green. 2 started forward, as if its vivid color mesmerized him. 3 hesitated. “I’m getting tired — maybe we should go back. I think I could use a nap.”
“Hold on,” 2 said. “Let’s just look at what’s beyond here, for a minute.”
“Why?” she asked, growing irritated, but after it was apparent he wasn’t going to turn back she huffed and started after him.
“I just feel… this door looks familiar.”
“Why? How could it be familiar?”
“I didn’t say it made any sense.”
When they reached the end of the hallway, the door proved to be made of green-painted metal. 2 shoved it inward and it groaned and squealed on its hinges, resisting him. In the end it became stuck about halfway open, but it was enough for 2 to slip into the room beyond. 3 followed.
It was a fair-sized chamber without windows, water-damaged, some of its scaly ceiling fallen away to reveal its slatted understructure, the scabby mottled walls looking diseased. As always, whatever machines had formerly operated here (had the complex been a factory) or beds resided here (had it been a hospital) were gone as if they had never existed. But there was one interesting feature in the room. In one corner, as if cowering together in fear, stood four chairs. With their metal frames and torn vinyl seats showing the spongy padding inside, they were identical to the chairs that stood around the table in the banquet hall. And piled upon this grouping of chairs were four rolled-up sleeping bags. They appeared new, and identical to those in which 2 and 3 and the others slept every night.
“Spares?” 2 wondered aloud. He walked to them, took one sleeping bag down and opened it up, spreading it on the debris-covered floor. “Yeah, definitely, same as ours.”
3 approached the quilted sleeping bag, got down on hands and knees upon it and smelled the area in which a person’s head would rest. “Huh,” she said.
“What?”
“I can smell the soap we all shower with. Someone’s been using this. Maybe the testers have been camping in this room all along, and we didn’t know it? Or do you think there could even be another group of subjects in this place with us?” 3 felt something under her knee, changed her position and unzipped the bag further. She reached inside, took hold of an object and drew it out to examine. “Ugh!” she exclaimed.
“What’s that doing in there?” 2 asked.
She held the small head of a doll with long, bleached-blond hair. 3 flung it away from her, across the room. “Weird,” she said with distaste, but she then rolled onto her back and stretched her body out fully. “God I’m so tired. Maybe I should just nap here.”
2 stood over her, gazing down. “That sounds like a good idea,” he said.
“Why don’t you open a bag, too?” she said, holding his gaze. “And we can take a nap together?”
“That sounds like a good idea,” he repeated. “Maybe I’ll open up all the bags, so we’ll have plenty of room to take a nap.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” she echoed, smiling subtly.
So 2 took down one rolled sleeping bag after another to unfurl them and spread them on the floor together. In so doing, tucked into each of the bags he discovered another disembodied doll’s head, each doll different in style. “Why would anybody do that?” he asked.
“Get rid of them,” 3 said. “They give me goose bumps.” She embraced her own bare arms.
Having tossed the last severed doll’s head into a far corner, 2 got down on their thin makeshift mattress and stretched out beside her. “If you’re cold,” he offered in a soft voice, rubbing at the raised bumps on one of her arms, “maybe I can make you warm.”
10 and 6 had mounted a series of cement staircases to a third floor landing. Here they came upon a corridor with its right-hand wall masked by graffiti, its far end lost in gloom. They could see enough, however, to tell that some of the black paint had run down from the wall and puddled on the hallway’s floor. What drew their attention, though, was a large window facing onto the stairwell. Bars covered it, but the glass was shattered outward. As the two men approached it, 6 wondered, “Could someone squeeze between the bars?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think they could dive through the glass between the bars.”
“Maybe they broke it first and then squeezed through.”
“Or maybe nobody jumped out at all.”
“So what was that we saw in the grass?”
“Whatever it was,” 10 stated, gazing through the large gap broken in the pane, “it isn’t down there now.”
6 grunted in assent. “Yeah. Did they get up and walk away?”
“Like I say, maybe it wasn’t even a person.”
“Hey… look,” 6 said. “There is something.”
Now both men noticed that in the spot where they had seemed to observe a figure from the banquet hall’s windows, a nest of numerous black filaments floated and rippled in a breeze, which rustled through the tall grass with which the strands blended. As the men watched, one after another of these whipping strands became dislodged and airborne… until within only moments of their first noticing them, all of the thin black streamers were gone.
“What was that?” 10 asked. “Some trash or something somebody threw down there?”
“Guess it was. Guess that’s what we saw: trash.”
10 then realized that white flecks were also being borne along in the breeze. “Hey,” he asked stupefied, “is that snow?”
“Snow in summer?” 6 said. Then, perplexed, he added, “It is summer, isn’t it?”
6
9 backed away from the window in the banquet hall, unnerved by what she had witnessed only moments after the men had left the room: the sudden eruption of writhing, swirling black threads and ribbons, like the tendrils of some huge inverted jellyfish, as if a monstrous plant had suddenly bloomed from the place in the overgrown grass and weeds where there had appeared to be a human figure. Then, the rapid dissolution of that weird plant, its streamers swimming away and dispersing on the snow-spitting wind. And now there was nothing, as if she had only imagined it all.