Subject 11

9

Exasperated, 5 had to wait for 2 and 3 to vacate the women’s shower room before she could finally take her own shower. She didn’t want to speculate on the reason for their long delay in emerging. When they did, they both apologized sheepishly as they slipped past her. She wanted to ask 3 if she — he? — intended to continue using this shower instead of the one reserved for the men, but didn’t. She supposed it didn’t really matter. But again, she fretted that 3’s condition might contaminate the research project’s aims, if her ambiguous state were not already known. If it did invalidate the test, she damned well better still receive the money that had been promised her.

She stripped, wetted her hair and body with the hand shower, then shut it off to lather herself with soap. Having done that, she activated the spray again and ran it over her head and body to rinse the soap away.

As she was spraying her hair, head tilted forward a bit and the water streaming past her eyes, a presence attracted her attention and she shifted her gaze to the new wall of graffiti. A person appeared to be standing in front of the wall with their arms hanging at their sides, watching as she showered, and yet the figure was unnaturally dark as if silhouetted. Startled, 5 raised her head and soapy water promptly ran into her eyes. She sputtered, stumbled back, rubbed her free hand over her face. Finally her burning eyes cleared, but when they did she saw no shape standing in front of the mural. Whipping around, she saw no one anywhere within the small room with her. Had there been, but they’d fled? Or had it only been a trick of the blurring, rippling water across her vision?

A wave of tingling radiated across her neck and back, and gooseflesh swept down her arms. She quickly rinsed off the rest of her body — but didn’t spray her head any further, lest she again compromise her vision and make herself vulnerable to another person… or to her own imagination.

“Are you familiar with the concept of entropy?” 2 asked. Of course, there was no reply from the four walls that boxed him in the confessional. He had told 3 he needed to make his daily Reconciliation before he retired for the night. Not being a Catholic, she hadn’t recognized the term for confession until he’d explained it to her.

“Entropy is more in the realm of physics than mathematics, but I always had greater aims than just being a math teacher. I wanted to be a great researcher, a pioneer, a mad fucking scientist… an Einstein or Hawkins. A Carl Sagan or Michio Kaku would do. But one’s dreams break down, don’t they, because that’s entropy for you.

“Entropy is a measure of disorder, and entropy follows what you call an ‘arrow of time,’ which means like time it can only go one way — toward greater entropy. The infamous second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease, but will increase whenever possible. A macrostate is made up of microstates, and it’s vastly more likely for a macrostate to contain a greater than lesser number of microstates. That’s why it’s so much more likely you’ll have a bad hand in poker than a straight flush. Like I say, entropy leads inevitably to increased entropy. And so one’s ambitions, one’s hopes and aspirations, tend to have this way of breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces until they become irretrievable. So compromised they’re unrecognizable.

“So I may never become a great scientist. I may have to be content holding onto my chiseled down little math teacher pebble for dear life. But I pray to the God beyond all physics that I can hold onto what’s left of the dreams I had for me and 3. I can’t tell her, can I, that when I found out the truth about her it was a major blow.” He laughed out loud. “Ah… let’s not talk about major blow right now. The thing is, I was both kind of dismayed and excited at the same time. On a purely sexual level. On a freaky wild, I’ve-never-visited-this-exotic-country-before level. But in terms of forming a relationship with this wom… this person. In terms of marrying this person, and introducing her to my son and my family and the world as my wife… my feelings are more conflicted than I’ve let on. I still want to be with her. I still hope we can build something. But… but…” He broke off and sighed, words failing him as he had passed from the halls of science to the jungles of emotion.

“The thing is,” he mumbled, in a faraway voice, “I can’t remember if I discovered the truth about her up in that storage room on the third floor, or just a short time ago in the mess hall.” He shook his head like a dog casting off water. “But what am I saying… of course I discovered it in the storage room. How could we have made love without me noticing a little something like that?” Again he was reminded of the drugs they’d all been taking. Again, reminded of his resolve to no longer take them.

“There’s negative entropy, called negentropy, but that’s not a reversal of entropy — it’s just a measure of organization, sort of the complement to entropy. But can you imagine if we could manipulate that ‘arrow of time’… if entropy could be reversed, toward greater and greater order and unity? If we could control that — control time, control physics — then we’d be God ourselves.” His voice was growing faraway again, sluggish as his eyelids grew weighted. “We could become whatever we wanted to be, and fulfill all our dreams and potential. We could become the whole that we never otherwise seem able to attain…”

6 didn’t look forward to sharing the men’s dormitory with 2 tonight, after their heated exchange, but he didn’t fancy the alternative of dragging his sleeping bag elsewhere to set up camp. The series of rooms they had been using for dorms, showers, toilets, and the laundry were all close in vicinity to the banquet hall, and all had been swept clean before their arrival. Most of the other rooms in this complex appeared to have dusty, chalky, debris-pebbled floors. And truth be told, he found the place eerie, and the proximity of the other test subjects — yes, even including 2 — to be comforting.

But as he turned in early for the night and slipped into his sleeping bag wearing just his boxer shorts, he hoped he fell asleep before 2 came in to join him. He wasn’t normally one to back down, but getting into a fight wasn’t worth losing four thousand dollars.

The room was warm, its sole radiator giving off heat, and the material of the greenish sleeping bag was thick but light. He thought he’d be successful in cozily drifting off before 2 showed up. He lay on his back, contemplating the tiles in the ceiling. Some of them were missing, leaving empty black gaps. For all he could tell, that was the night sky behind them — or the infinity of space.

Already growing drowsy, he felt that he could hear the faint sifting/hissing sound of falling snow against the building’s roof and windows. But that was impossible in here, he knew. Still, it was a soothing kind of white noise, perhaps created by his own mind to accompany him to sleep.

Slumber was about to take hold, but 6 never did sleep on his back, so he rolled onto his left side. In so doing, he saw the figure step out of the graffiti.

It was in the shape of a man, but without clothes, without features, entirely obsidian as if the person had been dipped in glistening black oil. Elastic black strands connected the back of the figure, from head to feet, to the painted wall. It took one slow step forward, and some of the strands stretched thinner and disconnected. The faceless black face turned in 6’s direction.

He screamed, screamed shrilly, and thrashed madly to kick himself out of his sleeping bag, which suddenly seemed like more of a straitjacket. The eyeless figure took another slow-motion step across the room toward him.

6 managed to get free, scrambling to his feet. The wet-looking walking silhouette had taken a third step, and the last of the stringy tar tethering it to the wall had snapped, when 6 bolted from the room still shrieking.

3 and 5 met him in the hallway. He crashed into them, nearly bowling them both over, and as they held onto 6 to both calm him down and hold themselves up, he looked back over his shoulder with wild eyes.

“What is it?” 5 asked, unconsciously digging her nails into his arms.

“Someone in my room!” 6 panted. “Someone walked out of the wall!”

“What?” said 3.

6 babbled in Spanish — “Fantasma!” — but then swallowed and tried again. “A ghost! A fucking ghost — in there!” He pointed toward the open doorway to the men’s sleeping room.

“Come on,” said 3, breaking away from them and striding toward the room purposefully.

6 cried, “Don’t!”

“Wait!” 5 called. Though terrified, she started after 3.

If there truly had been an apparition, it would be gone when she looked, 3 thought. Wasn’t that the teasing and fickle way ghosts operated? And yet she still had to see for herself…

It was still there.

There was no longer an upright, human-shaped figure stepping across the room. Instead, what 3 and — close on her heels — 5 encountered was a barely anthropomorphic form lying on the floor. This mostly shapeless mass at best resembled a human being bound tightly in a black plastic garbage sack, and as if imprisoned thus and running out of air, the cocoon-like form was squirming and thrashing on the floor in a frenzy. When 6, having mustered his courage, came up behind the two women, he was oddly reminded of himself when he had been struggling to free himself of his sleeping bag.

The flopping black shape on the floor did not utter a sound, but one could discern a shallow concavity that appeared like a rudimentary mouth. A mouth that stretched as if to howl, but couldn’t.

5 was screaming, and backed up hard into 6’s chest. 3 yelled, “Go get 2!”

“Who?” 6 said, unable to take his bulging eyes off the creature.

3 looked at 6, and a vague desperation seized her. She pushed her way between 5 and 6 and went dashing off down the hallway, in the direction of the confessional. Hadn’t 2 told her he would be performing his “Reconciliation”?

“Entropy,” 2 muttered, like a dreamer. His eyes were slitted half closed. He was a macrostate, being pulled apart into so many microstates. Or was it, somehow, something like the opposite?

3 threw the door to the confessional open, and screeched in terror.

2 was draped heavily in the office chair, his head lolling to one side, slack-mouthed. From all four walls, four walls completely coated in the black and white graffiti, gooey threads extended to 2’s body, attached to him like attenuated suckling leeches. Drooping cables like jungle vines that had grown out of the walls to make a nexus of him. He was the center of a black web, a net that had an oddly geometric look to it, as if the angle of each strand were significant. Some of the thicker of these tendrils pulsed like organic things.

“Come on!” 3 wailed, near hysterical. “Wake up! Wake up!” Despite her horror and her aversion to letting any of those creepers make contact with her, she stepped into the room, protected by the outline of the door’s threshold where it formed a gap in the graffiti. Hunching low to protect her head as she moved in further, she seized 2 by the ankles. After swiveling him around in the chair to face her, she pulled hard, teeth gritted. 2 slumped down lower in his seat. Gathering her strength, adrenaline flushing through her, she yanked at 2 again. This time he slid out of the chair and onto the floor with a thump. She heard him moan and his head rolled to one side. Many of the connecting strands had snapped free, and their ends wavered in the air like the severed tentacles of an enraged giant squid. 3 started backing toward the doorway, dragging the math teacher’s large body across the floor. Fortunately it wasn’t far to the hallway, and in seconds he was fully out the door. The last sticky strings broke free of him.

3 reached in to close the door. While countless tendrils still coiled and wriggled in the air, others were receding into the walls and vanishing. 3 slammed the door shut and turned back to 2, knelt down by his side. For a moment she was afraid to touch him, lest whatever had reduced him to this state should afflict her through contact, but then she grasped and shook him. Tears in her eyes, she again shouted, “Wake up! Wake up!” She would have called his name if she’d known it.

2 lifted his head from the floor and blinked at her groggily. “Oh Christ, my back. I think I fell out of my chair and hit my head.”

Convulsing with sobs of exhaustion and relief, 3 fell across his body. Confused, though not unappreciative of her concern and the physical contact, 2 slid his arms around her.

When from the tail of his eye 6 saw two figures moving down the hallway toward him, he whipped around with a gasp, but was relieved to recognize them as 2 and 3. 3 was holding onto 2’s arm, the latter shuffling like an old man and looking pale, sweat filmed on his face. “You got to see this thing, quick!” 6 called. “Before it’s totally gone!”

Mesmerized, one hand clamped over her mouth as if she might scream again or even be sick, 5 moved out of the way so 2 could step into the doorway to the men’s dormitory and view what lay inside. 3 leaned around his body for a look, as well.

Where before there had at least been a vague semblance of a body, now there was only a gelatinous black heap on the floor. It quivered, pulsated, and it was coming unraveled, ribbons rising up in greater and greater numbers and rippling as if a strong fan were blowing them from below. One by one they came loose from the mass, and almost instantly as they went airborne they dissolved and were gone. With each ribbon torn loose, the mass on the floor diminished that much more.

“It’s like the thing we saw outside in the grass,” 6 exclaimed. “The same thing!”

“What the fuck is it, though?” 5 said behind her palm. “Ectoplasm?”

“It’s like the stuff that was all over 2 just now, in the confessional,” 3 told them.

The last bands of black tissue drooped and went limp on the floor, as if all the mass’s energy had been spent. Worm-like, these strands writhed across each other but more and more sluggishly. Then, one after another, they grew still and rapidly melted away. Within several more seconds, there was nothing left — not even a stain.

“Was that a ghost?” 6 cried. “I never heard of a ghost like that! What the fuck was it?”

5 looked across the room at the mural of graffiti. “Whoever or whatever it was,” she said in a stunned, drugged voice, “they’re gone now.”

2 shoved open the green metal door at the end of the hallway on the third floor. He led the other three subjects into the room in which he and 3 had chanced upon the chairs and sleeping bags grouped in the corner. The bags were still unrolled on the floor where he and 3 had spread them out and made love on them. In a far corner were scattered five doll heads of various sizes, styles and materials.

But in the middle of the room stood a lone, sixth chair with one rolled-up sleeping bag resting on it. The rolled bag made him think of his dream of the giant snails. He was confused; why hadn’t he and 3 opened this bag, too? Was this the bag they had seen 5 drag into the room? No… no, he recalled opening that one, finding another doll head. He walked to the chair, took down the new sleeping bag and unfurled it. Sure enough, a sixth doll head was secreted within. He added it to the discarded collection, moved the chair to join the others and lay out the bag on the floor with the rest.

“This is where we’re going to sleep tonight,” he announced.

“Why?” asked 5.

“Why?” 6 exclaimed. “It’s obvious — there’s no graffiti in here!”

“We were designated our rooms to sleep in,” 5 protested. “Maybe we’ll be going against orders if we sleep in here instead, and forfeit everything.”

“Why should they have a problem with that?”

“The graffiti showed up in our bedrooms for a reason. They want us to sleep near the graffiti.”

“Fuck that,” 6 spat. “I’m not sleeping in a room where ghosts walk out of the walls!”

“I’m not sure that was a ghost,” 5 said. “Strictly speaking.”

“Then what was it?” 6 argued. “If it wasn’t a ghost, then that’s even worse.”

“If I hadn’t come in when I did,” 3 said, “who knows what would have happened to 2.” She looked up at him. “How do you feel?”

“I feel pretty fucking unnerved, is how I feel, after hearing what was happening to me.”

“But did it hurt you in any way?” 5 asked.

“I feel confused, and like I could jump right out of my skin.”

“But that’s just nerves, right? It didn’t actually do anything to you.”

“That’s because I stopped it before it could!” 3 persisted. “If you want to sleep alone beside the graffiti, go ahead; the rest of us want to sleep in here. We should barricade the door with the chairs or something.”

“Good idea,” said 6.

5 laughed, wagging her head. “Listen to you guys! Yes, some very bizarre things are going on. But it’s obviously part of the test we’re getting paid to participate in! We signed contracts!”

“They never told us about this crap,” 6 said.

“Obviously they didn’t tell us for a reason, so as not to contaminate the experiment or something.”

“That artwork isn’t graffiti,” 2 said, pacing the room as if it were a prison cell. “Either it’s disguised to look like graffiti, or we’ve just misinterpreted it as graffiti. It’s something else.”

“Like what?” 3 asked him.

“It’s like a portal, or something. I’ve looked at it up close. It’s all made up of tiny numbers; zeroes and ones. Binary numbers. I don’t know why, but it’s something weird. It isn’t the work of kids with spray cans.”

“Okay, what if you’re right?” 5 said. “All the more reason not to avoid it. It’s obviously something we’re meant to interact with. Look, it’s in the confessional, the bedrooms, the showers, the laundry… all the places where we live aside from the mess hall. What does that tell you? They do not want us to avoid those rooms!”

“I don’t care,” 3 said. “I hate to lose the money, but after what I saw in the confessional I won’t sleep beside that stuff again. I swear it was trying to suck the life out of 2.”

“Oh man, you don’t know that,” 5 said. “Look, I’m as creeped out as the rest of you, for sure.; I saw that thing, too. And I told you what I thought I saw in the shower with me — probably the same entity. I don’t know what’s going on, either. But we really have to think about what we’re doing, here.”

“The place is haunted,” 6 stated simply, “and they know it.”

“Well, if that’s true, maybe they want us to communicate with these spirits or whatever they are, and the graffiti is kind of like a… Ouija board or something that lets them come through. Isn’t it kind of exciting besides being scary?”

“Fuck that. Enough. I’m sleeping here — final.”

3 looked 2 up and down closely, as if examining him for lamprey-like scars left on his skin where the inky cords had been attached. She didn’t detect any discernible marks. Regardless of this, she stated, “I’m not doing any more confessions, either.”

“Me neither!” 6 said.

“You will forfeit this test, I swear,” 5 said, her tone becoming more sharp.

“I don’t care!” 3 snapped.

“We’ve all done plenty of confessions by now, and we’re all okay.”

“Well I guess it doesn’t happen to us every time we’re in there — maybe it’s just because 2 fell asleep — or maybe it does happen to us every time but we’re kind of hypnotized, and we don’t realize it. Maybe we can’t see it happening to ourselves, but other people can see it. We don’t know because no one has watched anyone else do a confession before.”

“Well,” 5 retorted, “we’re just taking your word for this, really. You’re the only one who claims they saw these goopy strings connected to 2.”

“Oh, you bitch,” 3 hissed. “Are you calling me a liar? Why would I lie about that? We’ve all seen enough weird things now… we know it’s all true, even if we don’t understand it!”

2 narrowed his eyes at 5 with fresh appraisal. Since he’d seen her dragging the chair and sleeping bag into this room her behavior had struck him as erratic. He didn’t doubt now that she had put the doll heads in the bags; after all, hadn’t she been the one who originally discovered them? He said to her, “I don’t get you. You were as spooked as anyone by what we saw in that room. But now suddenly you get all calm and adventurous.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t spooked,” 5 insisted. “But yeah, maybe now that we’re seeing more clearly what we’re here for, what we’re meant to experience, I’m just accepting it and rising to the challenge like the rest of you should be doing. Per your agreement!”

“Put your money where you mouth is,” 3 said, “and go sleep in the girls’ bedroom alone tonight, and the rest of us will stay here.”

5 stared hotly into 3’s eyes for several long seconds, and then said, “Okay. Okay, I will.”

“No,” 6 said. “Don’t do it.”

“Go ahead,” 3 said. She raised her arms dramatically. “Rise to the challenge.”

“I will, ladyboy. And I’ll collect my four thousand dollars while the rest of you walk out of here with empty pockets. You’ll have gone through all of this for nothing.”

“Don’t go,” 2 said. “We don’t want you to do that.”

“Oh let the bitch go,” 3 said, pulling 2 back a few steps by his arm. “Let her be a hero and show off for Dr. Onsay.”

5 turned toward the green metal door, which thus far still stood open. She paused in its threshold, and glared back at the other three subjects. “You’re going to ruin this whole test.”

“So be it,” 6 said. “Goodnight, then.”

“You’ll be sorry.”

“I think it’s you who’ll be sorry, when you wake up with a ghost standing over you,” 3 said.

“Well, magic portals or not, I guess we can’t run away from ghosts anyway,” 5 said, just before she backed into the hallway. “There’s one inside every one of us.”