Gwendy’s Final Task

14

WHEN GWENDY PETERSON WAS a young girl, she and her best friend Olive Kepnes played a game called “Mermaids” at the Castle Rock Community Pool. They waded side-by-side into the shallow end until the water, chilly even in August, reached the middle of their chests. Then they took turns sitting on the bottom while the other girl remained standing and recited a series of secret, made-up words. Once her breath gave out and she resurfaced, the underwater girl—the Mermaid—would try to guess what had been said. There were no winners or losers in this game. It was simply for fun.

When Gwendy opens her eyes to the bright overhead lights, the memory notebook pinned against her chest by one tightly clenched fist, Olive Kepnes and this long-ago game is the first thought that pops into her head. The voice coming from the other side of the shiny white door, no more than a half dozen feet away, sounds distant and garbled, like she’s hearing it from underwater.

She lifts her head and looks around, her eyes settling on the black and silver Keurig coffee maker. She blinks at it in confusion. She knows she’s on a rocket ship traveling through space, she remembers that much, but what in the blue blazes is a coffee machine doing there?

She tries to sit up, and experiences a flash of ice-cold panic when she discovers the restraints holding her in place, and then an immediate flood of relief when she realizes she must have dozed off in her bunk. She unbuckles the harness and floats upward from the narrow mattress. Just like Tinkerbell, she thinks in a moment of pure amazement.

There’s a hollow knock at the door and the muffled voice comes again. Gwendy doesn’t recognize it—in fact, is unable to determine if it’s male or female—but it sounds like someone is saying, “My dog is lost in the hay.” Even in the swirling gray mist of her half-awake stupor, she’s pretty sure that’s not right.

Whoever it is outside the door thumps again, a loud triple-knock this time, and then there’s that same voice. “I went fishing in the bay,” it murmurs, with even more urgency this time around.

Gwendy slips the notebook into her pocket, then gives a single lazy kick and glides across the capsule-shaped cabin. As she reaches out to unlatch the door, it occurs to her that there’s no peephole centered at eye level like there is on her front door back home in Castle Rock. This bothers her for some reason and she hesitates, suddenly afraid. Is this what it feels like to lose your mind?

Holding her breath, she pulls open the heavy white door. Adesh Patel and Gareth Winston are floating above the common room floor, the pair of large viewscreens lapping at the bottom of their boots like dark hungry mouths. Mother Earth, still surrounded by that gauzy haze Gwendy noticed earlier, winks at her from hundreds of miles away and keeps right on spinning.

Adesh, brown eyes wide with concern, swims closer and asks, “Gwendy, are you okay?”

It had been the entomologist’s voice she’d heard calling out from the other side of the cabin door. Winston, bobbing up and down a few feet behind him, looking like a plump marshmallow in his unzipped pressure suit and grinning that I’m better-than-you-and-you-know-it grin of his adds, “Sounds like you were having a whopper of a nightmare, Senator.”

Gwendy speaks a little too cheerfully to come across as entirely convincing. “I’m fine, boys. Just dozed off and took a little catnap. Space travel does that to a girl.”