Subject 11

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.

Damn 10 and 6, for having left her alone here. Shouldn’t one of them, at least, have offered to go sit in the confessional in case Dr. Onsay or someone else were listening, and let them know there was an emergency? Someone, maybe even one of their team, apparently having fallen or jumped from an upper story? Might there be someone lying there still, and she just couldn’t see them for all the ground cover?

She would do it herself, she decided, turning with determination to march across the cavernous room toward the closed confession chamber’s door.

9 threw open the door to the closet or former restroom that served as their confessional. Its single padded office chair stood empty, and so she shut the door after her and moved forward to seat herself.

2 dreamed of large snails with spiral shells like rolled-up sleeping bags, and the smiling rubber heads of dolls. These snails traced slow, aimless paths across a floor carpeted with fallen flakes of paint and crumbs of plaster.

He could hear the long clomping strides of a giant — and yet he never saw this giant. The invisible titan’s steps would grow thunderously louder as it approached one of the oblivious snails. Then suddenly, the snail would flatten, crushed under the invisible being’s foot, the shell shattered like a clay pot. The rubber head would go rolling away, still smiling. And from the broken snail shell would spread a sticky puddle, as black as ink…

2 opened his eyes to hear the ponderous, clomping steps of the giant.

He sat up abruptly, saw that 3 was curled asleep beside him, her small brown body covered by the flap of one of the sleeping bags. Those slow pounding steps were growing louder, louder as they approached down the hallway beyond the metal door. Eyes fixed on that emerald green door, which he had managed to push shut again earlier, he reached over to take hold of 3’s leg through the padded sleeping bag and shook her.

“What?” she grumbled, shoving his hand away.

“Get up!” he whispered urgently. “Somebody’s coming!”

3 lifted her head, grimacing. Then, as she finally registered the encroaching crashing sound, she scrambled to her feet, gathering up her strewn clothing. 2 was already on his feet doing the same.

2 had just finished lacing his sneakers when the clomping sound stopped right outside the green metal door. There were several weighted seconds of silence, and then a sound like the dying groan of a sinking ship as its iron hull collapses. Something was shoving at the door.

“Who’s there?” 2 demanded. 3 had simply cried out inarticulately, and leaped behind him, holding onto his waist.

Despite its resistance, the door was opening inward in fits and starts. 2 looked around him for a weapon. But why, he asked himself, did he feel he needed a weapon?

The door had shifted enough to admit a large greenish head like that of a giant turtle. But it was soft, boneless, as the probing head squeezed into the room. Not an animal’s head, but only a rolled sleeping bag. Following this came a slim, white figure. A woman in white clothing. But she was dragging something behind her that wedged in the narrow space, not soft and pliable like the sleeping bag.

“Jesus!” 3 said, angry for having been so afraid.

2 walked across the room to grab hold of the metal door’s latch, and he tugged on it with all the weight of his tall, large body. It squealed open enough for 5 to pull into the room the chair she had been dragging after her. The chair which, as it bounced up the stairs beyond the hallway and across the floor of the hallway itself, had sounded like the thudding stride of a giant.

It was another of the chairs, with metal frame and vinyl padding, in which the test subjects would sit at the banquet hall table.

“What are you doing with these?” 2 asked 5 as he stood before her.

The woman looked up at him blankly. Like a sleepwalker, he thought. Then, in a similarly distant voice, she spoke. “I thought I’d store these things in here.”

“Did you put the rest of this stuff in here?” he asked her.

5 looked past him, at the chairs clustered in the corner and the four sleeping bags overlapping upon the floor. “I don’t think so.”

“Well why bring this stuff in here now?”

“Well, because we’re not using it.”

“What do you mean, we’re not using it?”

“We don’t need it. We have five chairs and five sleeping bags downstairs. That’s enough for all of us, isn’t it?”

“Enough?” 2 began, exasperated. But then he paused, stared into 5’s face for a few moments, and resumed, “Yeah… yeah, that’s all we need.”

That night, with the large windows so black they might have been painted over, and the bloodless glow of fluorescent lights illuminating the banquet hall, the five of them collected the dinners that dropped down the PVC pipe into the plastic bucket and took them to the Formica-topped table to eat. On one side of the table, 3 sat with 2 to her left and 5 to her right. Opposite them sat 6 with 10 on his right.

As she removed the humble dinner fare from a paper bag with her number penciled on it, 5 glanced over at the PVC pipe that speared up through the high ceiling, and said in a low voice, “Someone is definitely in the building with us, upstairs. Next time one of us should sneak up there and look around when we know it’s time for them to send down our meal.”

“And do what?” 6 asked. “What are they doing wrong by being in the building? They’re just conducting the test, right? Why do you need to catch them at it?”

5 looked at him, her expression vague, and said nothing, returning her attention to her meal.

“What’s funny,” 10 said, flattening his paper lunch bag on the table in front of him and smoothing it out with his hands, “is, why assign us these particular numbers? Why am I 10? What’s the significance of 2, 3, 5, 6, and 10?”

“What do you mean?” 3 asked.

“I mean, the implication is that there are gaps. Missing numbers.”

Chewing, 2 shrugged and said, “Who knows what their test system is? What does it matter to us?”

10 grunted, but he seemed unsatisfied, his brow rumpled as if in troubled thought. He had the aspect of one trying to recall a disturbing dream that had slipped away upon waking.

“So anyway,” 6 said, “I don’t know what to make of what 10 and I saw from the window up there. Maybe someone just threw a bag of rubbish out the window or something, and it opened up and all this crap blew away. A person couldn’t get between those bars easily… unless it was you.” He smiled across at 3. “And we didn’t see any body down there.”

“Maybe it was part of the test,” 2 said, “and they’re just fucking with us.”

5 turned to stare across the room at the imposing black windows. Reflected in their multiple panes, along with the fluorescent tubes overhead, she saw their gathered reflections. Her own floating face gazing back at her, with eyes lost in black pools of shadow like those of an empty mask. Small and distant, as if it were being sucked away into the night beyond.

“I wonder how much longer we have to go in the test?” she mumbled, more to herself than anyone. “Seth… Seth might be missing me.”

The others, not knowing of whom she spoke, did not reply.

“And my Mom,” 5 went on in her dreamy voice. “She needs me. She’s dying of cancer, uterine cancer, and I watch TV with her in the hospital.”

“I take care of my Dad, too,” 6 told her. “Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll be finished with this soon.”

Sipping tap water from his tumbler, 2 eyed 5 surreptitiously over its plastic rim. Earlier, before they had left the room where he and 3 had napped, a thought had occurred to him and he had taken the rolled-up sleeping bag from 5’s hand. She hadn’t resisted. He had unrolled and unzipped it, and inside uncovered yet another doll head — the fifth doll head to be tossed across the room. When he’d asked 5 if she had hidden the plastic head inside the bag she had professed to know nothing about it, but he was suspicious about this. He was still not satisfied with her answer about storing the sleeping bag and chair in that room because they weren’t needed. She had seemed so out of it, and didn’t look all that much more with it now. But then, he had to admit he wasn’t feeling all that sharp himself. The pills they took every morning… it probably had to do with that. He was beginning to become concerned about them. But how could he avoid taking them, when their ritual was to watch each other do so? Could he hold six pills in his mouth without swallowing them, and when the others were looking away return them to his hand? But what if cameras were indeed watching their every move, and he forfeited his four thousand dollars?

Having finished their meal, they crumpled the paper bags and — per the instructions they had received upon having been accepted as test subjects — dropped them into a hole that had been cut into the floor not far from the plastic bucket in which their bags of food and pills were deposited. Watching his balled-up bag plummet quickly into darkness, 10 speculated that another PVC pipe must be fitted to this hole, to direct all their trash into a bin or such on a basement level below. But why be so fastidious about trash when this entire place was in such a state of ruin? Perhaps it was a condition imposed on the researchers by the owners of this property.

His eyes shifted to the plastic bucket, positioned under the PVC pipe. He remembered at one of their first breakfasts, one of the team moving the bucket aside and peeking up through the thick tube, calling, “Hallooo!” Which one of them had that been, again? He couldn’t remember that part.

“Well, I’m going to do my laundry, I guess,” 3 sighed.

“I’ll go get mine and join you,” 2 told her.

“Me, too!” 6 said.

2 turned and looked at him with a faint scowl.

“I think I’m just going to go to bed early,” said 5.

“I’ve still got to do my confession,” 10 said. He was about to start across the room toward the confessional when something caught his eye — an object on the floor behind the plastic bucket. As he heard the others dispersing behind him, he squatted down, moved the bucket to one side, and picked up the object he had spied.

It was just another balled-up brown paper lunch bag. But why behind the bucket and not dropped down the trash chute? He vaguely recalled now, maybe at the same breakfast he had just been thinking about, one of their team tossing his bag across the room as if launching a basketball at a hoop, and missing. Who had it been? Again, he couldn’t remember that much of it. Idly, not even truly curious, he opened up the wadded paper to view the number that was certain to be penciled on it.

“Huh,” he said, perplexed.

The number was 8.