Chapter 2: Ten of You

He got to ten.

The clock struck twelve.

Twelve strokes, quick and even, in the same voice it had been ticking in all along, and when the last of them was gone the room was as quiet as it had been before, as if the sound had never been in it. Then, from a long way off, past the walls and past whatever the walls were made of, a bell answered. One stroke. Low. Wes felt it come up through the floor and go out through his back teeth.

He had waited for that strike. He had sat on the floor and waited for it and it hadn’t come, and he had given up on it, and now here it was, with both hands still standing on the twelve where they had been standing the whole time.

He put his eyes around the room before anybody moved. Four walls. No door, and nowhere in any of the four that a door could have been. The seams ran across the floor and up the walls and over the ceiling in the same long squares, as if the room had been poured and come out lined. The bulb in its cage of wire burned flat and even, and the corners were as bright as the middle of the room, and he had stopped trying to work out how.

Then people began to sit up.

The man in the black tee came up on his knees first, one hand flat on the table edge, and then seemed to think better of the rest of it and stayed low with his forearms on the tabletop, looking around.

The woman in the gray suit went up on one elbow. She turned her own hand over and looked at it, and then at the room, in that order, without hurrying.

The big man got a forearm under himself and lay there with his face down, breathing loud and even, in no hurry to be looked at.

The one who had been lying with his arm across his face pushed himself up onto a hip and let the arm fall, and there was ink down the inside of it, blue and green and a lot of it, and he looked at the mask and did not like what he saw.

A woman with her hair pinned up sat back against the wall with her legs out in front of her and said, “I was at work. I was in the middle of—“ and stopped, and did not finish it.

Nobody asked her what she was in the middle of.

The old man against the far wall had his chin up. He stayed the way he had been, hands on his knees, watching.

Wes turned his head the other way, and there was a man standing at the far side of the table.

He had lain with his back to that corner. There had been nobody standing in it.

The man wore a black suit, well cut, and his hands hung loose at his sides, and he had the settled look of a host at his own table. On his head he wore a goat.

It had been a goat. The hair had gone yellow in places and black in others and had knotted itself into little ropes that stood out at the jaw, and two holes had been cut where the eyes went, and behind the holes there were eyes, and the eyes were moving, going from one of them to the next and not stopping on anybody.

Under the animal smell, thick and close and at the back of the throat, there was another smell, thinner and older, and Wes did not want to put a word to it, even to himself.

“Good morning,” the mask said. “Nine of you.”

The voice was a man’s voice, clean and unobstructed, and somehow that was worse than a muffle would have been. It was a voice that could have been ordering lunch.

“I’m glad we’re all awake,” it said. “You’ve been asleep in front of me for twelve hours.”

Nobody said anything. The man in the black tee looked at his own hands, and then at the wall behind the mask, and then at the mask again.

He had said ten out loud a minute ago, in a quiet room.

He counted again. He counted the way other men check their pockets, not to learn anything, just to feel the shape of it, and then he did the other thing that came after the counting, which was to look at nine chests and see whether any of them had stopped. They hadn’t.

“Who are you?” the man with the ink on his forearm said. The words came out slower than the man wanted them to.

The goat’s chin came up. “I was hoping one of you would ask,” he said. “I’ve had the introduction ready for hours. I’ve been going over it.”

“Don’t.”

The woman in the gray suit had her voice all the way back. She sat up straight and put her feet together and looked at him the way a person looks at a bad contract.

“Don’t introduce yourself,” she said. “I don’t want your name in my mouth. Whatever it is, it isn’t worth the air.”

The mask’s hands came down slowly, and he stood there and looked at her and said nothing at all, and that quiet had a shape to it.

“Here’s what I do want,” she said. “This stops. Now, before anybody gets hurt, and it stops with you telling us where we are and walking us out of here. Call it kidnapping. Call it unlawful imprisonment. I don’t care which one sticks. There are ten of us in this room. Everything you say from here goes on the record, and I’ll make sure of it.”

There was a mark of gray dust on the sleeve of her suit, and while she talked she went after it with her thumb, working the cloth in small circles. It seemed to bother her more than the room did.

“That’s twenty-four hours, by the way,” she said. “At least. That’s what I’d swear to.”

“Twenty-four.” The man in the white coat turned his head. “You’ve been awake nine minutes. Same as me.”

“I get it off the clock.” She pointed without looking at her own hand, and her hand was steady. “That one. Both hands on the twelve. The last clock I looked at said twelve too, and that was in my own kitchen, before any of this. I’m a bad sleeper. I’m up at midnight most nights. I know what midnight looks like.”

“Midnight at home doesn’t—“

“Say he’s telling the truth.” She didn’t raise her voice. “Say we’ve been asleep twelve hours. Then that clock has come all the way around once to get back where it started, and twice if you count the twelve it started on. That’s twenty-four hours, and I’d like somebody to tell me where the arithmetic fails.”

He didn’t answer that.

“There’s no door in this room,” she said. “That’s the other thing, and it isn’t arithmetic. Ten people go through a door that isn’t there. Somebody spent real time on this room. You don’t do that on your way past.”

The man in the white coat looked at her for a second and a half, and then stopped looking at her, and the way he stopped was not agreement.

“That clock could have been standing at twelve since the day we got here,” he said. “You’re building twenty-four hours on a stopped clock.”

“Then find me a better one.”

He didn’t.

The arithmetic was good. Wes ran it twice and got the same answer twice. And he had watched the minute hand on that clock for a long time and never once seen it move. What the white coat didn’t like wasn’t the numbers. It was her — the straight back, the thumb going around and around on that sleeve.

Nobody else in the room had gone after the dust on their own clothes.

“Ten,” the man in the black tee said.

Heads turned.

He raised one finger and moved it in a slow circle, counting them, and Wes watched him do the same arithmetic Wes had done from the floor, in the same order, arriving at the same place.

“Ten of us,” he said. “You said nine.”

The mask did not answer him.

He didn’t look puzzled, either, and that was worse than an answer. He stood with his hands folded in front of him and let the question lie there on the table with everybody looking at it.

“He asked you a question,” the big man said, from the floor, without lifting his face.

The mask went on not answering. He had the stillness of a man who had heard the question before and had already decided how he was going to answer it, and that it could wait.

“Hey. Clown. You hear me?”

The mask turned.

“You don’t know me,” the tattooed man said. “That’s your problem. You put me in a room and you don’t know who you put in it. I’m going to kill you. I want you to hear that out of a person’s mouth, not out of—“

His knee went out from under him.

He didn’t fall far. He caught the table edge with one hand and hung there with his whole weight on it, and tried the other leg, and the other leg did the same thing, and then he was down on one hip with his arm still on the table, breathing through his teeth.

“Legs,” he said. “Something’s — I can’t get my legs.”

Wes tried it. He put his heel against the floor and pushed until the muscle in his thigh burned, and his foot moved him nothing at all, and he pushed another second because stopping felt like agreeing to something, and then he stopped.

He put it away. He would find out what it was. He didn’t have to find out this minute.

Across the room the woman with her hair pinned up pinched her own thigh, twice, hard, and looked up at the ceiling. The big man got both hands on the floor and shoved and came a few inches and had to lie back down. The girl in the hoodie tried to get up and went over sideways and stayed there.

Ten of them, and the man in the mask had said nine.

He went around the room again, slower. Hands. Shoes. Faces. Nothing in any of it told him which one.

But ten was ten, and nine was what the mask had said, and the two numbers did not go away by being looked at. One of the ten wasn’t here the way the other nine were here. One of them was with him.

The mask came around the table.

He didn’t hurry and he didn’t drag it out. He came the long way, and people leaned back to let him past, which was interesting, because nobody could move.

He stopped at Wes’s end of the table, behind the smiling man.

Wes was close enough to see all of it. The man in front of him was young, with the same gray dust on him as everybody else, and he was smiling. It was a big, open, stupid smile, and it had been there before the mask said a word.

When the hand came down on the back of his head, the young man turned and looked around the table fast, at all of them, bright-eyed, as if he was about to be handed something he’d been promised.

Then the hand pushed.

Wes heard it before he understood it. Not a crack. A knock, wet and final, and something giving underneath it the way bone wasn’t supposed to give.

Then there was a color on the table that had no business in that room. It went out sideways from the man’s head in a wide wet wash, pale and pink and streaked, and it kept going, and it reached the edge, and then it was on people. Wes felt a dot of it land on the back of his wrist, and another come down across his eyebrow.

Nobody moved. Nobody made a sound.

The young man’s shoe slid off the edge of the table and hung there against the wood.

Somewhere a long way off, the bell went again. One stroke.

Something had landed on Wes’s cheek. It was warm, and thick, and it was still moving.

His hands had started shaking, both of them, small and fast, down low where he held them. He let them.

The hand that had done it went back to the man’s side, unhurried, the fingers loose.

What kind of hand does that.

For three seconds the girl in the hoodie didn’t move at all. She was on the dead man’s other side, close enough to have been splashed across the whole front of her sweatshirt, and she sat with her mouth open and her eyes on what was left, and then she screamed.

It went on. It didn’t take long to stop being a scream and start being something else, and the man with the ink on his forearm got a hand over his own mouth, and the woman in the gray suit sat perfectly still with her eyes closed.

The screaming didn’t hurry him. He stepped back from the table and put his hands together, the clean one and the other one, and let it run its course.

“Ten,” he said at last, pleasantly, over the top of it. “Because I needed one of them to make you quiet.”

Wes wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

Then he looked at his hand.