Part 1, Chapter 11

 

 

XI: The Dock

 

              In the new context of living with a girl who could seemingly spontaneously produce fire, Ray suddenly found the concrete and metal of the Hole to be comforting—or, more accurately, the lack of wood. All in all, save for some isolated objects like the sofa, their clothing, or the papers in the file cabinets, their place of living was largely fireproof. But this was not enough to make Paula feel comfortable, evidently, and Ray awoke the following day to see her scurrying about the underground chamber putting any flammable items as far away from each other as possible, lest she accidentally spark some chain reaction of fire.

              “Maybe I should get rid of the sheets on my bed,” she mumbled nervously as she picked at her lip.

Ray leaned against the wall groggily behind her. “Don’t you think that’s overkill?” he yawned. “It was, like, the tiniest fire I’ve ever seen. Little tiny pathetic fire.”

Paula glanced at him as if offended for a fleeting moment, then turned her attention back to her bed. “I just don’t want anything to happen while I’m sleeping. I could kill you if I started a fire.”

He rubbed his eyes. “I’m sure I’d be fine.”

“And maybe that would kill me, too—hot things don’t seem to affect me, but that doesn’t account for the toxicity of fumes an uncontrolled fire could produce. I’m sure I could certainly still choke to death.”

“Paula. Would it make you more comfortable to just ditch the sheets?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, then do it.”

“Emotionally, I mean,” she added. “Physically, no. I just—,” she paced around the bedroom. “I just think—that… It seems to be ramping up, right? Because at the beginning, when you were leading me around by the hand, you never said anything about my skin feeling hot. But that changed. You burned your hand on the cover of the manhole just because I’d touched it.”

“Could’ve also been the fact that it’s made of metal and was getting sun all day.”

“Yeah, but weren’t you able to hold on to it just a couple seconds before that? Before I had touched it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“See? So it was probably me. And then there were all those stupid tricks I pulled on the beach to get clothes…”

He scratched at the back of his head. “You need it more than they do.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about, I’m talking about heating up the sand, heating it sufficiently to make people uncomfortable enough to want to move. I boiled water…” she trailed off, pulling on her fingertips mindlessly. She turned to look at Ray. “I boiled water, Ray, that is not normal. How was I just okay with that? And then last night, the flame. That’s—there’s something bad happening. I think I’m sick.”

“With what, fire disease? I don’t know medical stuff, but we gotta be real with ourselves. I don’t think it’s a virus kinda thing.”

“So what, then? Something worse?” She sat on the corner of her bed, body tense. “Am I—Is it something more intense than that? Something metaphysical? Maybe I’m possessed. I don’t know. I don’t even believe in that stuff. Do I? Maybe I do.”

“Jesus, Paula, you’re not possessed.”

              “Then how do you explain whatever this is?” She gestured towards her eyes. “This is not a thing that just happens. Or boiling water. Or starting fires out of nowhere.”

              “It very well could be,” Ray said calmly. “We’ve just forgotten.”

              “Then maybe it is a virus, and you’ve just ‘forgotten’ how viruses work.”

              “Nah, I don’t think so.”

              Her voice was rising. “See, but that’s not fair. You can’t just refute things because you don’t feel like that’s how the world works, and then tell me I can’t do the same thing.”

              “What? That’s not what I said.”

              “It functionally is, though!”

               A pause. “Why don’t we get outside for a little? Some fresh air?”

              “Are you trying to say I need to calm down?” she asked flatly.

              “No! No, no, I just—usually go out to the beach at night, but I didn’t yesterday, so I feel like I need to get out.” He wrinkled his nose. It had been lingering in the back of his mind as his brain had slowly woken up that day, but now he finally noticed with his full consciousness the faint foul smell that hung in the stale air. “It also kinda smells weird down here.”

              Paula sighed. “Okay. Sure. Let me change into something more presentable,” she said, shooing him out of the room.

              “Oh, yeah, same.”

              (He had no intention of changing out of his hoodie.)

              Ray chuckled to himself as he turned and left. Why this girl cared any bit at all about looking presentable to a bunch of half-naked beachgoing strangers walking around the island, he found completely unfathomable.

              He found Hitchcock in the kitchen (the raven had pierced through a bag of rice and was probing it with his beak), and lifted him up to his shoulder. Eventually Paula emerged from the bedroom, wearing a wide-brimmed sunhat. It was too big on her, and shifted just out of place with every movement, but she still managed to make it look elegant.

During one of their days spent “shopping” up and down the perimeter of the island’s beach, Ray had spotted at the far side of the island a very nice-looking dock, which he’d meant to properly check out since. They set out towards it from the Hole, with Hitchcock fluttering closely behind.

              Ray took with him a bare stick of a mop he’d found on one of his shopping trips in the dumpster, which he’d leaned against one of the walls in the main room. It was made of smooth, solid wood, and nearly as tall as he was when he held it. He’d begun using it as a walking stick on his nightly excursions around the island, especially as he trudged through the mangroves and needed to test if the ground ahead of him was solid or a deep pool of mud with a caked surface. Navigating the woods with his staff made him feel like some great adventurer.

              A considerable way into their walk, Ray did a double-take after realizing Paula had been walking differently, and saw that she wore bright orange heels.

              “Wh—Paula, heels? You know we’re gonna walk along the beach, right?”

              She looked him up and down. “And you’re wearing a thick hoodie and sweatpants. You know we’re going to walk along the beach, right? I can take off my heels.”

              She strode with confidence and rhythm, with her chin pointed up and her arms moving fluidly at her sides. In the oppressive daylight it was impossible to see any luminescence escape from her eyes, but still she seemed to emanate rays of sun as she walked.

              It was only when they were within view of the dock that Ray remembered it was across the road. He gazed at the streams of cars in agitated stiffness, watching the great shining hunks of metal as they shot over the tire-marked asphalt. He hated the metallic beasts. They were ugly, moved impossibly fast, and made him feel strange. But he made up his mind that he would cross the road anyway, though he waited long enough for a clearing in the traffic for an increasingly impatient Paula to snap at him to just go already.

              Once on the other side, they were met with a tall chickenwire fence separating the public area of the beach from the part containing the dock; he saw now that it appeared to be part of some school of marine science.

              “Uhh, yeah, I don’t see a door in the fence, so it’s cool if—”

              “We can climb it,” Paula cut him off.

              “Yeah? You’re alright with that?”

              “Yes.”

              He shook his head at her slowly. “I don’t get you.”

              Ray was beginning to find Paula to be completely impossible—just yesterday she’d nearly gone hysteric over going down the hallway of a chamber they’d already been living in for a couple of weeks, and now she was perfectly alright with trespassing in broad daylight.

              They climbed the fence (Paula climbed in her heels) with no issue; no one was around on the premises of the school—Ray wondered if it was a weekend. The beach here was small, with only a couple yards of beige sand separating the tangles of sea oat and beach elder from the waves that steadily scaled the slope as high tide approached.

              The air here, away from the dense wet vegetation of the mangroves, was light and fresh; it still carried the salt of the sea, but also a pleasant floral sweetness. The waves lapped rhythmically, but minorly, so that very little sand was kicked up from the sea floor—the water was a brilliant turquoise, and glittered radiantly in the afternoon sun. The island was quiet here, away from the public beaches.

              They stepped onto the dock, and Ray ran his hands along the wood dock pilings. They were weathered and dark where the water lapped against them, and encrusted with barnacles and sprigs of rust-colored seagrass. Ray set the mop stick down. They sat at the edge, legs dangling over the vibrant water, quietly observing the sea. The waves were so mild that the water’s surface was like a transparent sheet of glass, and they watched tiny yellow and blue damselfish dart around the sea-eaten wood.

              Ray fell into a thoughtful trance watching the undulating water. His mind always seemed to return to trying to piece together some shining revelation about who he and Paula were, but every time he found himself picking at nothing. At the beginning, after they’d first woken in the abandoned stadium, Ray had conjured up some successful, heroic image of himself within his mind—someone who’d gather evidence and clues and draw logical conclusions, and sort everything out neatly as if it were a great jigsaw puzzle. That was only two weeks ago, but he felt childish now thinking about that—it was as if they’d been playing detective, nonsensically convinced there would be a trail of breadcrumbs leaving them to some cohesive, succinct answer. But the truth was that he felt almost no closer to assembling their pasts than he’d felt their first day here.

              It wasn’t that it particularly bothered him, having no sense of where he came from. He knew Paula felt that way—she was perpetually frustrated—but he was perfectly content with the idea of just starting over from where they did. It was less some deep-rooted sense of misery over his loss of memory that kept driving his thoughts towards the mystery, but more simply, a genuine curiosity.

              He rubbed his sleeve under which the tattoo lay. Was he stupid? Was there something he wasn’t seeing? It felt as though they’d accumulated quite the collection of strange eccentricities—the chalkboard was witness to this—and yet they didn’t seem to point towards some obvious narrative. He wondered airily if there was someone, somewhere out there, who knew about his and Paula’s pasts. Maybe somebody had witnessed whatever calamity had caused both of them to lose their memories. Maybe somebody was looking for them. Maybe their families were looking for them.

              He ran his fingers over his scalp. Why hadn’t they gone to the police, again? That would’ve been the obvious thing to do, right? But he recalled that bizarre, constituted feeling that had grasped him by the shoulders all those days ago, when he’d first considered asking someone for help. Even now he had no concrete idea of what exactly had caused this feeling, and yet it was unshakeable and as firm as a physical wall separating him from any stranger he’d consider approaching.

But still—maybe he’d been foolish to take mere intuition as a deciding factor. Paula was clearly unhappy in their current state. If they couldn’t make substantial progress in reasoning their identities past their first names, maybe he would have to consider ignoring those warning feelings and bring this to the attention of someone else. He certainly didn’t want to—he was indeed, as far as he was aware, perfectly happy milling about and forming an entirely new sense of who he was. But he knew Paula was discontented, and that was beginning to wear on him.

              Paula was sitting with her hands on either side, gazing down at the transparent water. She’d set her heels beside her neatly on the dock. Her head was fixed, and her lips were pursed tightly as if she were deep in thought.

              Then Ray noticed a grey mass moving underneath the surface of the water—a large rounded shape, not unlike a boulder in appearance. But as he squinted at it he realized it was moving—moving at a pace so slow he thought himself wrong several times and decided it was in fact stationary. But, no, the object continued to glide closer to the dock leisurely. Hitchcock hopped off his shoulder and perched at the edge of the dock with a stately stance, peering below alongside Ray.

              As it approached their place of rest, and accordingly the length of water between him and the object lessened, the waves’ distortion softened and he saw another lump joined at the object’s end; then two other lumps, one on each side, and a very flat lump on yet another side—and finally, so late that he laughed at himself for having been so completely off in his prior assessments, he realized he was scrutinizing a manatee.

              He was enraptured by the creature, and instantly tugged at Paula’s shirt and whispered excitedly to look (he wasn’t sure how these animals worked, and whether or not their voices might scare it). But the manatee seemed entirely unaware of their existence altogether, and continued to glide on its path as if being pulled by an invisible rope. As the creature’s back passed by the end of the dock, Ray saw that its tail was terribly scarred, with so many cuts and scratches it was as if someone had dragged a knife along its flesh. The length of its back was tinted green, coated by a thin layer of algae.

              At last the manatee disappeared from view as the water between them lengthened and grew more opaque, fading into the deep turquoise.

              “That was insane! He just passed right by us,” Ray said to Paula, beaming.

              She lifted her head. “What?”

              “The manatee.”

              “Oh,” she said distantly. “I didn’t notice.”

 

 

              The remainder of the day was spent wandering aimlessly about the marine school’s campus, complete with lunch (there was a vending machine on the side of one of the great white buildings, into which Hitchcock was gracious enough to wedge himself). At one point some older man dressed in a neat polo shirt passed by ahead of them, glanced at them, then continued on his way—but aside from this, they were given no trouble for being there. And to Ray’s enduring surprise, not once did Paula suggest they leave and stop wandering around where they weren’t supposed to. On the contrary, she went so far as to point at a building with strange architecture on the far side of the campus and say, “I want to see what that is over there”—words that were, of course, music to Ray’s ears.

              Even more surprising was Paula’s enduring stamina even as day gave way to night. Usually, she pressed for them to be back at the Hole by dusk, but today every building they circumnavigated gave way to another, or to a beach trail, or to a fence she’d challenge him to heave himself over. It got to the point where even Ray was beginning to lose steam during their night exploration, and began to wonder if the sun would be rising soon. By the time they arrived back, Ray was exhausted, and he could see that Paula was as well. Even for the past few hours, Paula had been yawning and supporting herself against walls where she could—and yet she had insisted that they not return yet.

Finally they trudged back through the mangrove forest. The fresh beachside air gave way to the heavy atmosphere of decaying vegetation and thick mud. They had gotten better at navigating the tangled limbs of trees (and Ray made a justifying use of his staff by using it to check if the ground ahead was solid dirt or a deceptive mud puddle), and were able to estimate in which direction they should walk depending on where they entered the woods in order to find the entrance to their home. As Paula lifted the manhole cover, a tiny part of him wondered if someone was already inside—if someone really had unlocked the door with the keypad, and if that someone would now finally meet them. But the Hole was quiet as they descended the chipped-painted ladder into the central room. Everything was as it was when they’d left earlier in the day.

              Paula sat at the desk in the bedroom and continued her journaling. Ray made a beeline for the kitchen, where he filled a dented pot with water. He lit the stove, which had decided on its daily coin toss to function properly this evening, and waited impatiently for the water to boil. He knew Paula could’ve hurried the process, but he hesitated to stress her out further about her abilities; so he leaned back against the kitchen wall, with all its mysterious brown stains and indentations, arms crossed in waiting.

              Hitchcock hopped off his shoulder and onto an unlit part of the stove. He scrutinized Ray and ruffled his feathers.

              “You’re gonna have to wait for pasta. Not ready yet.”

              Ray took a box of pasta from the pantry and broke its seal. They were down to the last two boxes of pasta. There were still other foods—some bags of rice, canned fruits, beef jerky, and other assortments—but it was beginning to dawn on him how finite their supply was. And once they exhausted the non-perishables in the pantry, the only other resource he had easily disposable to him was the collection of vending machines strewn about the island—and he acknowledged, reluctantly, that they probably shouldn’t try to live off of cinnamon buns so full of artificial substances they could hardly be called cinnamon buns, cheese puffs, and sour candies. They would have to start thinking of an alternative… But that was later. As of now, right now, he told himself, they were completely fine. It was not something to worry about.

              The raven fluffed his feathers again and looked at Ray expectantly.

              Ray threw his hands up. “What? What do you want?”

              Hitchcock cocked his head, then took off from the stove, soaring through the main room and fluttering to a stop just before the door to the hall.

              Ray sighed and rubbed his face as he followed behind. “No, no, nooo, dude, not again.”

              The bird pecked at the closed door.

              Wait. Ray had closed that door last night, after he’d put the papers back in the file cabinet.

              But hadn’t Hitchcock still been down the hallway when he closed the door? If he remembered correctly, the raven had still been at the very end of the hallway, standing stiffly before the “CONTAINMENT” door. Then how had the bird gotten into the kitchen this morning before they left for the day?

              “Paula,” he called, “Did you go in there while I was sleeping?”

              “Where?” she called back from the bedroom.

              “The room with all the files.”

              A pause. “No. Why?”

              “Nothing. Just curious.”

 

Part 1, Chapter 10

 

X: The File Room

 

              “No,” Paula said, grabbing Ray by the arm before he had even made a move towards the doorway.

              Suddenly Hitchcock lighted off Ray’s palm and plunged into the darkness of the hallway, soaring to the very end, where he descended and settled in front of the far doorframe.

              How? How had the door been opened? If it really had been opened by someone else, that meant there was someone out there who knew about the Hole and knew the combination of the door’s lock—maybe the same person who wrote all those awful journal entries. And if that person had indeed been down here recently, that means he would’ve seen all the evidence of them living down there—all their belongings, all the opened packages of food, all their notes on the chalkboard, all their time-keeping marks on the wall.

              Then why hadn’t he done anything about it?

              Ray looked behind him and scanned the main room. Everything was right where it had been: his pillow (disorderly pile of old towels) thrown on one end of the sofa, Hitchcock’s pile of sand in the corner, the bare stick of a mop he’d found at the dumpster leaned against the wall—everything looked untouched.

              Maybe Ray was overthinking it. Maybe it hadn’t been locked in the first place—just jammed. That could be it. And in either case, it wouldn’t be the end of the world for the Hole’s owner to return. It’d be inconvenient having to find a new place to stay, but that’d probably be the end of the ordeal. He shrugged it off—in either case, he concluded to himself, it really was no big deal.

              “Someone could be in there,” Paula said in a hushed voice. She stood firmly in place before the open doorway, arms at her sides, gazing into the darkness.

              “Nobody’s there,” Ray said. He paused for a moment to listen. The hall was silent.

              He took the first step forward into the darkness.

              “I hate you,” Paula growled. She hadn’t moved from the doorway.

              “C’mon, you’ve got flashlight eyes—it won’t be dark once you actually get here. It’s not scary,” he said while he continued down the hall, but the words as they escaped him were robotic and detached from a growing sense of uneasiness he hesitated to admit to himself. As he walked, he kicked up black dust that flitted about before tiring and settling back on the floor. Here the smell of burning and some other vague sour scent were stronger than in the main room, and the air was heavy and stale. The walls were of the same cement as the previous parts of the chamber, but here they were more crudely shaped, with lumps and indentations all along the hall. The ceiling hung low, and as he walked it felt like the corridor shrank and nearly gripped him by the shoulders.

              Finally, Paula strode through the doorway and caught up to him, more likely from a desire to not be alone rather than from a desire to explore what was down the hall. Her steps produced an odd sort of echo in the space that buzzed around his ears before falling away. About halfway down the hall, there was a door left just slightly ajar; but first Ray went to the very end, where Hitchcock was once again frozen before yet another door.

              “He ignored the first door down the hall,” Ray said, puzzled, “and made a beeline for this one, even though it’s further down.” There was a whole mysterious room awaiting his exploration, but still Ray bent down and crouched next to his raven. This time, there was no window through which Ray could see to the other side of the door—but at the very least, he took note that no light streamed through under the door, and here, too, all was quiet. It was unmarked by any intentional engravings or signage, but looked blackened along its bottom edge where it grazed the dark dust on the floor.

              Maybe it was some deep migratory instinct in the raven—some overpowering drive to move along some specific route, but the door was in the way of it. Ray forgot the open door and headed back down the hall to where he came from, then entered the kitchen. Paula followed closely behind, chastising him as he walked for being so senseless as to enter the dark hallway.

              By now he had convinced himself that the story truly was only that they had pulled at the door repeatedly enough for it to become unstuck, and he forced the idea of an intruder (or rightful owner) having opened the door into a very dark, very jagged and very small corner in the back of his mind.

              “Paula, I promise you,” he said as he fetched a dented bowl from the cabinet and filled it with water in the pathetic little sink, “no one has been here, and no one is here.” Briskly he headed back through the open doorway and plunged back into the darkness of the hall until he met Hitchcock at the end. He set the bowl of water gently down beside the bird.

              “Nobody’s touched our stuff,” he continued. “Nobody’s left any notes, or any ‘GET OUT’ signs, and we haven’t seen anyone in the mangroves.” He gazed worrisomely at Hitchcock for a long moment, and then, figuring there was nothing else he could do on the matter, turned tentatively towards the door left ajar in the hallway.

Paula tapped her foot nervously, following closely behind him still. Through the crack between the door and its frame, Ray could see that the new room was in total darkness. He pushed the door with the flat of his hand, and with an agonizing creak like a dying animal, it yielded to him.

The door opened to a room the size of a closet, and Ray was hit with a blast of musty air that smelled of decaying paper. Lining every wall were large metal file cabinets. They glowed softly as Paula peered into the door, reflecting the faint orange light that escaped her glasses.

“Would you turn on a light or something?” Paula hissed. “I can’t see like you can.”

To his right, there was, as it turned out, a light switch, which he flicked on to illuminate harsh fluorescent lights overhead.

“…Oh,” she said, shoulders lowering from their tense stiffness. “It’s kind of boring.”

“Storage room, I guess,” Ray said. “Worth a look, anyway.”

He picked the bottom drawer of one of the filing cabinets and sat down next to it, pulling it open with a creak. Inside, it was crammed with papers and manila folders and files, and everything was separated by dividers into chunks. He pulled out the first paper of the first section and held it up so that he and Paula could read.

“Are you sure we should be looking through this?” she said.

He snorted. “If we were worried about messing with someone’s stuff, we’ve done way too much damage for anything more to matter.”

Paula crouched next to him (carefully avoiding any part of her clothing touching the black dust on the floor), hands folded neatly on her thighs, and peered at the paper. At the top-left of the page was a low-resolution picture of a middle-aged man. He had black hair that covered his ears and a dark circle beard, and a blank, unreadable expression that somehow still struck Ray as intense. To the side of the picture were a few lines of identifying information. His name was listed as Gary Holbrook.

“I wonder if that’s the writer,” Paula said.

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Ray set the paper down on the dust-ridden floor and rifled through more files. He pulled out the first paper of the next section.

“I don’t think so. Look, this is a totally different person. Could be this guy too.”

This page was of the same format, depicting a woman with blonde hair that cascaded in thick, beautiful waves, and large blue eyes that gazed at the camera severely. She was showing the first signs of entering middle age, but had all the signs of careful attention to her maintenance of a youthful appearance. Her name was Susana Alfonso. The first paper in the next section detailed yet another person, a man with unruly brown and grey hair and wireframe glasses, listed as Francesco Calabretta. He had a long, uneven nose, and a funny sort of guilty twist in his lips. His face was slim, and his eyes looked tired.

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Ray scratched the back of his neck. “Okay, so backtracking more on the this-is-someone’s-house theory. These look like employees.” He tossed the papers behind him and dove back into rifling through the cabinet.

“Eh-eh-eh!” Paula interrupted, lifting her hand in disbelief. “What are you doing?” She snatched the discarded pages off the ground and shoved them back into Ray’s hands. “Either we finish reading them, or you put them back in the cabinet where you found them. If we’re to go through someone’s things, we do it methodically.”

Ray gave a shoddy attempt at putting the first page back at the end of the file cabinet, but the cabinet was so crammed with papers that it refused to enter without warping and folding over itself. He ignored the deformation and forced the paper down like someone trying to shove clothes into an overpacked suitcase.

Paula looked like she might explode. She snatched the paper back out from the cabinet and waved the crumpled page in front of Ray’s face. “This? This is putting it back properly in its place?”

She shook her head, irritated, as she surveyed the paper. It was the page about the man with the wireframe glasses and messy hair. She held it up closer to the light to get a better view of the text. Suddenly there was a bright flash where Paula’s fingertips pinched the corner of the paper, and there was a smell of smoke.

“Paula!”

Ray slammed the paper onto the floor and smothered the tiny flame with the bottom of his awful pink flip-flop. He raised his eyes to meet her luminous gaze and furrowed his brow. “Was that…involuntary?”

Paula’s hand was still frozen mid-air, where it had been holding the corner of the paper.

“Yeah,” she choked out.

“That was fire,” Ray said slowly. “Like an actual flame.”

Paula shrunk into herself. “I didn’t know I could do that,” she said quietly. She eyed Ray. “Sorry.”

“No, you don’t have to apologize, just—be careful. I guess.”

A thorny silence wedged itself between them.

Ray ran a hand through his hair. “How is that even possible…? I mean, I guess that applies to just the heating thing too, but straight-up fire is, like… I don’t know. That’s a step up.”

Paula excused herself, saying she was tired, and rose to leave the room. Ray felt oddly guilty. He took the singed paper in his hands, brushing off the blackened and brittle corner and letting the ashy pieces fall to the floor. He gazed at the man in the photograph.

Part 1, Chapter 9

 

IX: The Door

 

“Battleship?”

Ray was standing at the doorway of the bedroom, holding up a box of the board game. The box was tattered, and the color had worn off its edges. “Wanna play?”

Paula was in the bedroom, sitting at the desk and writing—she’d found some blank sheets of papers, and had taken to journaling as a form of entertainment. Ray had peeked over her shoulder once as she wrote, and she at once became very angry with him for invading her personal space. He had since tried to nip his curiosity and not read her entries, which took just about all the power of his neurological functioning.

Paula wore her denim jacket over a defiantly clean white shirt, and a pleated pink skirt—all stolen. The shirt was too small, but passed as slim-fitting. Her hair was untangled, and her skin was free from dust or sand. If Ray hadn’t known her and came across her now, he would never have guessed she didn’t come from a nice home. She lifted her head from the paper and furrowed her brow at him.

“Did you…get that from the dumpster?”

He wanted to say no. He wanted to say no so, so badly, because he wanted to play Battleship so, so badly, and didn’t want to risk Paula rejecting it for its second-hand nature.

“Doesn’t matter where I got it. Point is that I have it.” He shook the box, as if trying to entice an animal with a treat. “Battleship?”

Paula let out a long, dramatic sigh. “Fine.”

Beaming, Ray plopped onto the floor and opened the box voraciously.

“No instruction manual, but I think I remember how to play.”

Paula paused and tilted her head. “Yeah, I think I do too.”

They unfolded the two cases and placed their ships onto the pegboards, and the game began (with improvised pieces—one of the ships was missing, and had been replaced in the box with a yellow thumbtack). Ray was losing to Paula, hands folded in urgent analysis and contemplating his neck move when in the corner of his eye, he noticed something dark.

 He peered out through the doorway, and saw Hitchcock standing again before the locked door, staring stiffly ahead. Ray sighed. “Again?”

Paula turned and saw the bird. “Hm. Was he like that this morning before we went for a walk?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Ray rose to his feet and crouched next to his bird. He wiggled his fingers in front of Hitchcock’s eyes, but the bird had no reaction. His wings were tucked neatly on either side, and his beak pointed towards the door.

“Hey. Buddy,” he said, poking the bird’s side. “You good?”

Paula picked up a nub of chalk from the little pile on the floor. She stood up to face the chalkboard and drew a steady line connecting “raven” to “locked door”. Maybe they’d written “bird” in the wrong category; maybe Hitchcock had something to do with the Hole, instead of something about their pasts.

“Maybe he belonged to whomever lived here before,” Paula suggested, “and that’s why he likes hanging out in here, and follows people around.”

“You think? A pet raven?” Ray couldn’t help feeling a bit sad; he’d become quite comfortable with the thought that the raven simply liked him, and didn’t want to imagine Hitchcock someday returning to some owner.

“It’s just a guess.”

“Then what’s with the door obsession?”

“I’m not sure.”

Ray offered his hand in front of the bird for him to step up, but Hitchcock remained still. With his other hand he scooped him from behind, and now the bird stood on his palm, still unmoving.

Ray clicked his tongue. “C’mon, little guy… What’s up with you?”

“There’s nothing there, too—it’s just a door,” Paula said.  She tilted her head at the bird. “Maybe he’s just a little stupid.” She gripped the metal door handle and pulled.

The door opened with a heavy groan from its hinges. A blast of warm and stale air rushed over his face, with a faint foul smell.

She stepped back, face pale. “Wasn’t it locked?”

“Did you—put in a code? In the keypad? I wasn’t really paying attention.”

“No, I didn’t. Why did it open so easily?” Her breathing quickened, and she ran her finger nervously through the rosy tips of her hair.  “Someone was in here, someone was in here,” she mumbled.

“No,” Ray said. He stood behind her, arms crossed indifferently. “It just got easier to open ’cause I’ve been pulling at it so much.”

Paula turned to him and spoke in a grave voice. “Are you absolutely sure? How can you be absolutely sure?”

“I just am.”

She studied his face. It was stiflingly quiet. Ray wished he could see the expression eyes made under her glasses. But even though it was hidden from his view, somehow her gaze was still strong enough to make him look away.

The truth was that Ray actually wasn’t absolutely sure something else hadn’t opened the door. In fact, Ray had lied to Paula.

Something had unlocked the door.

 

Part 1, Chapter 8

 

VIII: The Sea

The following day, it occurred to Paula that they had no calendar or device with which they could track the passage of time. In fact, they had no idea what time of year it was at all—for all they knew, the hot, sunny days were characteristic of the middle of winter in such a tropical location. And still worse: they had no conception of what year it was.

              Their sense of time, then, was calibrated around the night they woke up in the abandoned stadium. Paula took one of the sticks of chalk from the board in the bedroom and, as the chalkboard itself was now reserved for deducing their pasts, made short strokes on one of the grey bedroom walls, each tally representing a day that had passed since the first night. Ray laughed to himself, feeling like they were prisoners counting down the days until their release.

              It had been only six days since they’d woken up in the stadium; not even a week, and yet already Ray felt as though he could tell stories and reminisce about things they’d experienced. He was beginning, he felt, to build a more complete image of Paula in his head—she was no longer a stranger, and he was becoming accustomed to what was typical of her behavior. Naturally, as he got to know Paula, he lent less and less weight to any critique that escaped her mouth, so great in breadth were her verbal treatises on how things should and shouldn’t be. Over the course of six days, she had completely transformed in his eyes. He remembered (sometimes, regretfully, with fondness) the time during which she’d said not much of anything. But then he’d snap out of such terrible thoughts—Paula was critical, and held herself at times like a bird of prey, but she was in any case wildly entertaining to him, and had her moments of kindness. He was aware, now, how the bizarreness of their situation bore down on her mental state, and hesitated to think ill of her. Besides, Ray was of such a tolerating disposition that even if she were indeed someone whom most people would find insufferably irritating, it would likely pass right over him. Though this configuring of Paula as a person, of course, and for that matter of Ray’s own temperament, had only occurred in those past six days.

              “Six days… That’s a six-day minimum since I last took a shower,” Paula said, horrified. She pulled nervously at her hair, which she’d tied into a ponytail that fell over her shoulder.

              Oh, showers! Ray had forgotten about those.

              Unfortunately for Paula, a shower was not among the features deemed essential by whoever had been living here before them; the extent of bathroom-like facilities in the underground chamber were the ominous hole of a toilet in the corner of the bedroom, and the little basin sink in the kitchen, neither of which were choice candidates for a full-body wash.

              “What if we go swimming?” he said.

              “I don’t have a bathing suit.”

              “I mean, yeah, we’d have to be in what we’re wearing now, but then our clothes’ll get washed too, so not all bad.”

              Paula raised an eyebrow. “You think seawater will clean your clothes?”

              Ray’s mind was already elsewhere. He was watching Hitchcock, who was standing before the final door of the chamber they hadn’t gotten to unlock—the door had remained untouched in the past days, with its ugly electronic lock. The bird’s attention was so fixed on the door that he didn’t notice as one of his claws began to scrape backward, sliding on the cement floor, before he corrected it and snapped back into his stance.

              Ray clicked his tongue at the bird beckoningly. Hitchcock broke his pose, peered back at Ray, and then fluttered over to join him on the sofa.

“We’re goin’ swimming, little dude.”

The bird pecked at his cheek, fluffed its feathers, then huffed a reluctant agreement.

             

 

The seawater did not clean their clothes. The water was dark with seaweed blooms and sediment that had been stirred up into the water by strong winds earlier in the day. The scent of salt was strong in the air, and if he let his feet touch the seafloor as he floated, his soles brushed against slimy patches of seagrass that seemed to try to grip his ankles.

Though it was daytime, and the sun was so bright there was no way anyone would notice any sort of glow from Paula’s sunglasses, Ray wasn’t in the mood to surround himself with blasting reggaeton music and the booming voices of beachgoers; so they hung back in an unpopulated stretch of beach, where the only movement on the shore came from laughing gulls and the odd skitter of a lizard.

Hitchcock wasn’t sure what to think of the water. He had been perched on Ray’s shoulder as he entered the water, but then Ray had begun to move into deeper water, where the water reached his shoulders; so Hitchcock had sought higher ground in the form of the top of Ray’s head. When Ray dove forward and submerged himself completely in the water, Hitchcock spazzed and flew to the dry security of the sand, in which he promptly buried himself.

When Paula entered the water behind him, Ray heard a light fizz, and he saw that the water around her hands was, almost imperceptibly, bubbling.

(Was that really possible?)

He squinted through the bright sun, thinking perhaps it’d only been a product of her hands stirring air into the water as she moved, but the effervescence was much too consistent. Maybe the bubbles were rising from somewhere in the seafloor, then—some creature or pocket of air in the sand. But Paula waded deeper, and the bubbling followed her hands as they moved through the water.

“This is kind of nice, actually,” Paula said, and Ray could see that her lips had curled into a smile. She was floating face-up, bobbing softly up and down with the swell of the ocean. Her skin was glowing in the warm sunlight. Ray was cast into a momentary shadow from a flock of brown pelicans gliding overhead.

“Bubbles,” Ray said ever-so-eloquently, and raised his index finger at her.

Paula lifted her head and noticed the tiny pockets of air rising to the surface of the water. She propelled herself backward, but saw that they followed her.

“I think they’re from your hands,” Ray said.

“What?” She fidgeted with her hands, opening and closing them. “Do I have something on my hands or something…?”

She rubbed them together as if trying to clean them, but as soon as they were back under the water the simmering started again.

Ray waded closer. “I think it’s safe to say a fever wouldn’t do this.”

She outstretched her arms in the water. “How is this even possible?” She turned to Ray frantically, voice rising. “That’s boiling. I’m boiling the water? Is this gonna hurt me?”

“Uh—,” He paused. Of course, he had no substantial answers. “I mean, it doesn’t hurt, right?”

“No, but—my hands don’t even feel that hot, look—” She stretched a hand towards Ray and tried to touch it to his arm, but he jumped back.

“Maybe don’t do that. Just—hold your hand in place for a sec.”

Paula’s arm was still, palm facing him.

Slowly and carefully so as not to accidentally touch her skin, Ray held up his hand close to hers. Even with a gap between them, he could feel the heat radiating off of her palm.

“No, your hand definitely is that hot. It just doesn’t bother you, for some reason I can’t even begin to get.”

She stared intently at her hands as if they’d tell her something. But on the surface, they looked perfectly normal—the same tone as the rest of her skin, and certainly with no signs of burning. She lowered them back into the water, then reclined onto her back and floated gently on the murky waves.

 

 

As the sun rose and set over the mangroves, and the moon continued its dance through its phases, The Hole—the name they’d given to the underground chamber—became less a shelter and more a home for Ray and Paula. With the dilapidated building blocks of a barely-surviving and progressively rotting kitchen, trips to the dumpster in search of anything worth salvaging (which Paula protested every time for the sake of decency and hygiene), and walks along the beach, they’d managed to build themselves somewhat of a routine, and with it a sense of normalcy that both comforted them and numbed them to the prior urgency of solving their pasts. Days passed during which the chalkboard remained unamended and virtually forgotten as their progress on investigating what had led them to the abandoned stadium slowed and tired under the beating humid heat.

But what did remain one of the central objects of their attention were Paula’s hands, and whatever thing within her seemed to painlessly create heat from nothing. With every passing day, Paula became more confident in whatever was causing this, and learned that her hands weren’t perpetually so hot—in fact, she’d somehow figured out a way to calm or inspire the heat herself, which she described as feeling like using some invisible muscle. As she grew comfortable with the heat not seeming to harm her, her anxiety over it began to fade.

There came a day when the stove refused to lend its heat to the pot of uncooked pasta Ray had put down on it. Paula, having been watching the culinary expedition from her spot leaning against the wall, moved to the stove and cupped her palms around the pot, and at once Ray understood what she was attempting. In moments tiny bubbles appeared at the bottom of the pot, then fizzled up to the water’s surface. Then the bubbles grew in size and quantity and intensity, vibrating with heat until the water had risen into a rolling boil that pulsed steam into their faces. Hitchcock, during that meal and many others, ate with them, plucking tiny bits from Ray’s plate.

As they settled into their lives in The Hole, they also became less fearful of the island’s many visitors, having learned the patterns and locations of their visits, and having grown accustomed to the fact that under the sunglasses Paula’s eyes really were unobtrusive—and soon they had become perhaps too comfortable, with Ray’s collection of items having escalated from things people had discarded or left behind, to things people had simply taken their eyes off of momentarily. It was in this way that Ray had begun to partake in what he and Paula called “shopping”, during which he stealthily perused and took from the buffet of items lying on beach towels as their owners bathed in the warm turquoise seawater.

The first item Ray acquired was a navy hoodie, whose theft he virtuously excused by reminding himself of its uselessness to anyone in the subtropical heat of the island. Its owner had thrown it onto the sand next to a backpack (which Ray had graciously left there, despite how stupid it was for his owner to have left it behind so carelessly) while he visited a taco truck. Of course, he couldn’t leave Paula without new clothes, especially considering how image-conscious she was, so after stashing the hoodie in a bed of cocoplum, he resumed his shopping.

              Paula had set her eyes on a denim jacket and pointed it out to Ray. The only issue was that its owner, a woman reclining on a towel and reading a book, was somehow still wearing it through the heat—so Paula, suddenly inspired by her desire for the piece, sat down near the woman and dug her hands into the sand. Ray had stayed back, unsure what she was attempting.

In a few moments, the woman shed the jacket and skirt covering her bikini, and left to cool off in the water. At once Ray understood, with something between uneasiness and wonder—Paula had heated the sand around the woman with her own hands, and had made her grow too hot to keep the jacket on.

              She and Ray pulled this stunt many times, though nearly every time it was for an item of clothing or an accessory that Paula wanted. In time she had accumulated the equivalent of a whole wardrobe, which she organized as neatly as possible by folding the clothes and arranging them in little stacks in the corner of the bedroom—all of the clothes aggressively feminine, many of which included some form of pink and begged with their flashiness for the admiration of onlookers (which Ray thought made them questionable choices of clothing, considering how much effort they’d been putting into keeping her eyes away from passerby’s attention). Ray, meanwhile, though Paula had forced him to commandeer a couple of extra t-shirts for the sake of hygiene, was perfectly content with his navy hoodie, somehow even through the burning sun. It didn’t look particularly high-quality, and it wasn’t new (the outer fabric had already started to pill), but there was something about the bagginess that just felt right—or maybe it was while wearing something so dark a color, it would be harder for Paula to spot patches of dirt or mud that had flung themselves onto the fabric and tell him to wash it.

              With the food and running water of The Hole having pushed them out of their state of survivalism, suddenly they found themselves with an abundance of free time—most of which they spent on various daytrips around the island, lounging on the beach and climbing structures they were certainly not supposed to climb (some abandoned, some still in use) to get views of the dusk sky. A favorite became a decidedly unattractive beige cube of a public restroom, which had a trash can just the right height from which to bound onto the roof and bask in the dying light of the day. Sunset, more than any other time of day, had become a ritual meeting time between the two of them; it was the time at which Ray and Paula’s energy overlapped, with Paula sleeping in a couple of hours and Ray only beginning to feel revitalized, and it was the time at which the diffusion of light over the world was enough for Paula to see, but not enough for Ray to shield his eyes with his hands.

The final locked door of The Hole, sitting quietly untouched to the right of the bedroom’s entrance, had come to be ignored by Ray and Paula for some reason neither of them considered tangible nor could explain. It was as if there was some shroud shielding it from their vision; on the few occasions that he did notice the door, he couldn’t help feeling some small, distant call of dread within himself that kept him from acting on his passing curiosity, and each time he soon would abandon the door for some other task or for Paula calling to him.

It was a week before their attention had been properly called back to the door, and it was not the door itself that drew their interest; instead, it was Hitchcock. The bird, once again, had taken to standing before the door. In the past few instances since the first, Ray had called to his bird and the bird had forgotten the door in favor of perching somewhere by Ray. But this time, Hitchcock seemed unaware altogether of Ray’s voice.

“Hey,” Ray said, “dude.” He waved his fingers in front of the raven’s eyes, but the bird did not move. “Y’okay, little guy?”

“Maybe he’s having a seizure,” Paula said.

Ray tisked. “Don’t say that. He’s okay, he just…really likes that door.”

They waited in tense silence for the bird to make any sort of movement, but Hitchcock was still for several more minutes.

“Hey, look, come play with your sand,” Ray said, sifting his hand through the little pile in the corner of the main room (To Paula’s dismay, Ray had decided, after Hitchcock had made it abundantly clear of his love for the material during their nightly walks along the beach, to bring a pile of grey sand into the underground chamber—it was for enrichment, he insisted.)

Finally, Hitchcock ruffled his feathers, cocked his head at Ray, and then flew onto the top of Ray’s head. He gave Ray’s scalp a sharp peck, then bounded towards his pile of sand and buried himself.

“Look, see?” Ray said. “He’s fine.”

But the bird’s relentless interest in the door was enough to push Ray over the edge, and finally he decided he would resist his avoidance and inspect it. It was plain and grey, like the other two doors in the chamber. The door had an electronic lock with a raised keypad; there was no sort of lockpicking he knew he could attempt on it. Additionally, unlike the other two doors, this door had a little glass window at eye level. Internally, he berated himself for having avoided the door. How had he not been curious enough to peek through the glass? He could tell even from the other side of the room that it was dark past the window, but there still could’ve been something visible. He stepped closer to the door pressed his face against the window.

As he peered into the darkness past the door, his insides turned cold. On the other side was a long hallway with a low ceiling, which made him feel confined only by looking at it. There was no source of light in the hall apart from the weak beam that entered through the window from the main room. Along one side of the wall, there were two doors, and Ray could see the faint outline of another at the end. The door at the end was identical to all the others, plain and grey, but above its frame was spray-painted in an industrial font:

CONTAINMENT

Ray strode into the bedroom and snatched a stub of chalk. Paula looked up from the desk in the bedroom, where she was playing a game of solitaire with a damaged pack of cards he’d scavenged. She looked up expectantly as he entered the room, awaiting an explanation for so purposeful an entrance.

“Maybe we can actually use some of this board for stuff about The Hole, too,” Ray said. “Y’know, just weird things we notice. ’Cause it’s kind of intriguing, right?”

“Sure.” Paula tipped her head thoughtfully. “But not with your handwriting.”

She rose from the desk and erased all the words they’d on the right half of the board and rewrote them on the left side with the others, then drew a line down the middle.

“Okay,” she said. “Left side will be things about us. Right side, the Hole. Give me things to write.”

“Weird journal,” he said. “And the hand hurting thing…manhole in the middle of the woods, with no path to it or anything…that locked door…”

“Why the door?”

“Have you looked past? The hallway?”

“No.”

“There are more doors down the hall. And at the end, it just says, ‘CONTAINMENT’.”

She furrowed her brow. “CONTAINMENT?”

She walked to the door and looked through the window herself for a long moment. He worried for a moment that the hall had reinspired her distaste for living down there, and dreaded a comment about how they ought to leave.

But quietly, Paula nodded, returned to the bedroom, and added ‘locked door’ to the board. “Food stock and bed, and a whole kitchen, like someone was legitimately living down here…” she added.

After rewriting some letters so that they matched the cleanness and clarity of the others, Paula nodded at the board, satisfied with her work, and returned to her game of solitaire at the desk. Ray sat at the edge of the pathetic bed and stared at the words on the board, chin resting in his hands, until the first sting of hunger—or frustration at having no revelatory theories concerning the words—drove him into the kitchen.