Ashes of Foreverland Read online

  All the deals he put together in Valencia had fallen apart by now. Santiago would try to delay the inevitable and convince the investors their millions of dollars were in good hands. But Danny had turned off his phone and left everything behind when he flew out late one night.

  The emaciated woman was coming out for another smoke, her tenth of the day, when Danny opened his door. Cicada song welcomed him to the summer furnace. He locked the doors and walked down the cracked sidewalk, feeling the eye of a neighborhood watch sign follow him to the corner house.

  The neighborhood had the smell of trash—sour beer and rotting eggs. Beneath it all, he noticed the faint hint of lilac. It reminded him of his villa off the coast of Spain.

  He climbed the porch and walked to the staircase built into the side of the house. The wood was relatively new, the steps leading up to a platform on the second floor and another on the third.

  His heart rate grew louder.

  The door on the second-floor platform was locked. There was a peephole but nothing for Danny to see inside. He looked around before lightly tapping with a knuckle. He waited a full minute before doing it again and thought about trying the third floor when he noticed the digital lock.

  It was brand new.

  He rapped one more time, staring at the distorted reflection on the numerical pad. Someone had scratched four letters into the gold-plated trim.

  GRAD.

  Danny punched the numbers that corresponded to the letters. Nothing happened. He rubbed his finger over the etching, the lines smooth and tarnished. Someone had done it quite some time ago. Assuming it was Reed, why would he put that there?

  Was it a clue?

  Grad was short for gradient, such as slope. That could be converted to a number, which could be the combination. Reed’s letters led him here with clues from the island, but there was nothing that corresponded with slope—nothing on the island or anything since. He couldn’t even guess.

  Grad could also mean graduate. Or graduating.

  Back on the island, when a transition was complete, when one of the boys had permanently vacated their body, the chimney would smoke. That was when the old men said someone graduated from the island, that they were healed.

  They got SMOKED.

  Danny punched the corresponding number: 766533.

  The lock whirred. Warm, stale air seeped out—

  “What are you doing there?” A man stood on the bottom step. He was wearing flannel bottoms and no shirt, his stomach overhanging the drawstrings.

  “Looking for a friend.”

  “And you just walk in?”

  “He gave me the code.” Danny pushed the door open.

  “Don’t mean you can walk in.”

  “I’m meeting him. He gave me the code so I didn’t have to wait in the sun, you know.”

  The man pushed his fingers through oily black hair.

  “Is there a problem?” Danny added.

  “I don’t know, is there?”

  “My friend up here making noise?”

  “Why?” The man’s second chin jiggled.

  “He doesn’t pay his rent sometimes.” Danny reached for his wallet. “Do I need to square up for him?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Look, is he paid up or not?”

  “None of your business.”

  The man looked away. Reed was paid up, but it was hard to tell if he was the landlord or a nosy tenant.

  “Have you seen him?” Danny asked.

  “Not in a while.”

  “Like a week? A month?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Which is it?”

  “What do you want with him?”

  Danny grimaced. “I’m worried about a friend, that’s all. He doesn’t feel good most of the time. If he’s not here, which I don’t think he is, then I’m just going to wait inside for a few, all right?”

  The man rubbed his gut in a slow circle like he was comforting an unborn baby.

  Danny walked inside, pulled the door closed and waited. When there were no footsteps up the staircase, he began to look around.

  All the blinds were closed. A couple of the windows were covered with sheets, throwing the apartment into dim gray light. A fan rotated on a coffee table, the whirring blades pushing dead air around the room.

  Danny turned on a short lamp. There was a couch and a couple of chairs. The pillows were perfectly arranged, almost intentionally, as if someone dressed the place up or never sat down. A kitchenette was to the left and a cluttered desk straight ahead.

  Danny stood perfectly still.

  It smelled like a vacation, like sand and sunscreen. Reed always had the scent about him, like he showered in the ocean. Danny sometimes wondered if there was a strange connection to the island, if somehow Reed had been infected with the false promises of Foreverland, saturated with the tropical allure.

  A television blared from downstairs. The ceiling creaked from footsteps above him. Inside the apartment, ghosts of desolation dared him to come inside, to look around. Light sliced through a bend in the blinds.

  He reached through the plastic slats and grabbed the Mason jar. It was nearly full of white sand, the kind that would sift through an hourglass. Or found on a tropical island.

  A green ink pen had been stabbed into it.

  All doubts fell away.

  A jar of mustard was inside the refrigerator, along with a block of hard cheese, an egg and a bloated jug of milk. It had been expired for six months.

  The bed was bare, the mattress thin and frayed. A round cushion was in the middle of the floor, a zafu for meditation. So he was meditating, just like Zin taught him.

  A few clothes were folded beneath the bed. Danny pulled out jeans and T-shirts. He was braced to find a tropical shirt—something Harold Ballard wore on the island—but they were solid colors. That’s when he realized one of his nagging fears: somehow Harold Ballard had returned from the ethers of the Nowhere and reclaimed his old body.

  He folded the shirts and noticed a black cable. Danny fished it out, pulling something heavy from the dark corner. Straps were attached to the end. A cold chill shook through his arms. The leather straps formed a headset with a knob that would center over the forehead.

  Inside was the needle.

  The last time Danny saw the headset was on the island, when the needle would flick out like a stainless steel tongue, find the hole in their head and transport them away from the suffering.

  To Foreverland.

  But Reed never took the needle, not until they forced it on him. He was the only boy on the island that refused Foreverland. So why now? Even so, there was no host to create Foreverland. It was Harold Ballard’s mind that created Foreverland. And he was gone.

  Where would he go?

  The other end of the cable had been cut. Whatever it was connected to was gone. And Reed had left the rest to be found, to let Danny know he was using it.

  Just above the naked pillow, scratched into the wall with the same instrument used on the digital lock, were tiny letters.

  Danny leaned closer.

  Build the bridge.

  He wondered if he left his home to follow the ramblings of a madman, an addict to the needle, a broken mind fighting to get back to Foreverland. Why would Reed go back to Foreverland? Even when they were on the island, when all the boys couldn’t wait to punch the needle, he knew it was a trap.

  Why go back now?

  There was no computer or television, no sign of anything electronic. In the front room, the desk was buried beneath memos and office supplies. An article had been trimmed and taped to the paneling. It was the only thing on the wall, a printout from The Washington Post announcing the opening of the Institute of Technological Research in New York City.

  That was Danny’s last and only trip back to the States.

  Spiral-bound notebooks were stacked in one drawer, their pages filled with poems and run-on sentences, no periods or commas, just page after page of words,
like a prisoner trying to relieve his loneliness by spilling his thoughts.

  With green ink.

  A sketchpad was at the bottom. Every page was covered with a face drawn in pencil, shadows smudged for effect. It was a girl with short hair. Despite the grayscale, Danny knew who the girl was. She had bright red hair and green eyes.

  Lucinda.

  She was Reed’s girlfriend, his love. If it wasn’t for her, they never would’ve escaped the island. None of them could thank her enough, and none of them could forget her.

  Especially Reed.

  The folders stacked on the desk were organized in a way only Reed might understand. There were photos that appeared to be all the teenage boys that had been on the island and a list of names. Incomplete list, it said. As if there were still victims to be discovered.

  There were meticulous notes on the back of each one, written in green ink, some describing their past and what happened to them. A photo of an old man was attached to each boy’s photo.

  The Investors.

  Was he hunting them down?

  It would be impossible to find them. The wealthy bastards disappeared after leaving the island in their boys’ bodies. They might even get plastic surgery, hide in remote places. Money could get you lost and never found.

  Danny knew that all too well.

  There was another folder with teenage girls, accompanied by the same type of notes and similar Investors, these old women. This was the other Foreverland, the one with cabins in the middle of Wyoming. Danny knew about that one, too.

  The Wilderness.

  While the boys were on a tropical island, the girls were stranded in cold desolation. Harold Ballard’s mother, Patricia Ballard, was the host. She was the one that created Foreverland for the girls, sucked their identities out and made room for the old women to steal their young and able bodies. But when Harold Ballard’s Foreverland was destroyed, his mother began to malfunction.

  The girls had it so much worse.

  They lived in squalor, forced to wear rags and crap in the woods while the boys slept in dormitories and played video games. Reed had photos of the survivors shortly after the girls were saved. They were beautiful with short hair that had been shaved when they arrived, but the memories haunted their eyes. They would never forget.

  None of us will.

  The girl on top, Danny remembered her. She was the one, they said, that saved them all. She had somehow escaped Foreverland, woke up to pull the needle out of her head. But when the other girls wouldn’t wake up, she volunteered to go back inside. She was blonde with blue eyes. He flipped the page over.

  Cyn. Her name is Cyn.

  It would take months to go through all Reed’s notes. Danny couldn’t carry them out without Flannel Pants seeing him. He couldn’t risk anyone calling the police, either. He could come back in a week, go through them more carefully. There must be a clue hidden in the text.

  He checked the other drawers, found several pencils and a new box of green pens. The lid was open. One of the pens was missing.

  Only one.

  Danny looked at the window, the green pen stuck in the sand like a cigarette butt. He sat down on the couch with the jar, pulled the pen out, and stirred the sand like thick soup. He went to the kitchen and brought back a bowl to empty it.

  Nothing but sand.

  Danny raked the contents, swirling it in circles, sifting it between his fingers. There were no prizes, no clues. Just fine particles of sugar sand.

  He thought about things to take, ways he might stuff them down his pants, a notebook or stack of papers, take them to the hotel and study them. He began pouring the sand back into the jar. Something was inside.

  My body lies beneath the sand.

  That was in the first poem. Danny assumed it meant Reed’s teenage body, but maybe it meant the sand in the jar, also.

  A square of paper was glued down, grains of sand stuck to the bottom. His fingers were too fat to reach it. He used the pen to swipe at the edges until it broke loose. The folds were intricate and numerous. It unfurled into a narrow strip with tiny green letters. He held it up to the dim light.

  It was an address.

  12. Alessandra

  Central Park, New York City

  Alex was tired.

  In her younger days, she could go days on a few hours of sleep. Now she was always tired, napping at least twice a day.

  She found an empty bench and sat back to record her senses. This moment—the green smell, the birds singing—was a keeper. She opened a new biomite function that would play the moment back with all these sensations on a later day.

  Ever since the biomite reset following the accident—the accident that never happened, she reminded herself—life had been good and the weather perfect. She was truly blessed.

  A couple jogged around a twenty-something college student. Her coat was out of season, along with her stocking cap. She approached with her head down, seeing only the concrete in front of her, carrying a to-go cup of coffee in each hand.

  Exactly what Alex wanted.

  “Hola,” Geri said.

  “Good morning.”

  “Caliente.”

  “You read my mind.”

  Geri dropped her bag between them. “How are you?” she asked with a trace of Chicago nasal.

  “How are things at the magazine?” Alex asked, tired of responding to Geri’s inquiry, a question everyone asked her nowadays. It was never in a flippant manner, like hey, hi, how are ya? It was very serious, very concerned. Like they all knew about the breakdown, the reset.

  “Good,” Geri answered. “Seven years of college and a ton of student loans might get me minimum wage.”

  “But you love what you do.”

  “Can’t get enough.”

  “And Jeff?”

  “A pain in the ass.”

  Geri looked over her rectangular glasses at Alex, studying, looking for an answer to her first question.

  Alex touched her hand. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

  It had that Let’s move on tone. Geri got the message, unzipped her frayed bag, coffee stains down the side, and dropped three folders on Alex’s lap, each an inch thick.

  “There’s everything on the Foreverland projects. I can dig up more if you plan to write about it. Which I don’t think you should.”

  Alex frowned. Enough, already.

  The plain folders were unlabeled and loaded with printed photographs and documents with tiny font. Most of it was public knowledge, but some of it was exclusive stuff that Geri was good at finding. It’s why Alex paid her to do the preliminary work. Sorting through the chaff was tedious.

  “There are two documented cases of Foreverland body snatching. One was somewhere in BFE, where a bunch of girls were kept in dirty cabins with a wood-burning stove and candles while rich old ladies lived in luxury. Their host was a comatose woman.” Geri looked over her glasses. “I think you know her.”

  Alex opened the folder and saw a photo of mountains and rolling hills and an old cabin. It could be the middle of Montana or Wyoming. She was familiar with the story, knew the girls were teenagers. The wealthy women kidnapped them, used Foreverland to suck their identities out of their bodies and then, voilà, an old woman moved in. It was like buying a new car—a young, healthy car with smooth skin and perky breasts and another sixty years of life.

  Alex lifted a photo of an old woman that looked like a shrunken version of a full-sized person, like God left her in the oven too long.

  Patricia Ballard.

  “The other folder has to do with the first Foreverland, the one on the tropical island. They were doing the same thing, the body-switch stuff, only with boys. They had it way better than the girls.” She grunted. “Figures.”

  There were photos of the boys and old men, of the buildings and grounds. It was more like a resort.

  “What happened to the kids?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was it like their brains were era
sed and reformatted? Where did the personality go, I guess is what I mean?”

  “That’s a good question.” Geri flipped through the pages and pulled a photo out of the stack. “The survivors said there was some gray cloud beyond the sky, like outer space. That’s where their minds got shredded and mixed together.”

  Dios mío.

  “They called the gray space the Nowhere. But here’s where it gets weird.” Geri put down her cup and slid the bottom folder out. “The guy that ran the tropical island Foreverland was Harold Ballard. He made a zillion dollars and went missing when the whole thing collapsed, probably sipping mai tais in a Mediterranean bungalow somewhere. He was, or is, the son of Patricia, the host of the wilderness Foreverland.”

  Harold looked more like a vagrant with a tropical shirt than a mai-tai-sipping zillionaire. There was a smile behind the dull gray beard, she could see it in the squinting eyes.

  “Patricia Ballard is married to Tyler Ballard,” Geri said. “Or was. Are you still married if your wife is a vegetable? I don’t know, maybe she’s not in a coma anymore, who knows where she is. In fact, I don’t think anyone knows.”

  “At the Institute.”

  “Did you see her?”

  I felt her. Alex flinched. That thought slapped her hard. She was at the Institute when I was there, when I was looking into Coco’s eyes.

  “I’ll bet you didn’t see her,” Geri said.

  Alex shook her head. No, no, she didn’t.

  “That’s what I mean. They say she’s in the Institute, but no one ever confirms it. You ever hear of her husband?”

  Again, Alex shook her head.

  “He invented the whole computer-aided alternate reality thing.”

  “Foreverland?”

  “Yeah. He used it to experiment on his wife, turned her into an overcooked vegetable and went to prison. And then guess what happened? Harold followed in daddy’s footsteps and started experimenting on anyone he could get his hands on, pretending like he was healing minds when he was just buying property and tropical islands to serve the insanely wealthy. The bastard put his mother in the wilderness and they played their messed-up alternate reality games while they made billions.”