The Vault of Dreamers (37 page)

To my right was the tunnel that led to the clock tower pit. Ahead of me, on the other
side of the glass, the rows of sleep shells glowed in the dark vault. As I opened
the door and stepped through, the filtered, humidified air filled my lungs.

I lifted my video camera to eye level and scanned it around the room.

“I’m in the basement of the dean’s tower,” I said. “These people are alive.”

In the hush, I thought I heard the faintest stirring, as if one of the dreamers shifted
to listen. I aimed my video camera into the first sleep shell at an eerie, deathly
young woman. Her voiceless lips were gray, and a pair of black pads was glued to her
temples. When her chest moved lightly, I instinctively inhaled along with her, willing
her to take a deeper breath.

Go fast
, said my inner voice.

I broke away to the next dreamer and the next, filming as I walked swiftly down the
row. The first time I’d visited the vault, I’d been shocked to discover the sleeping
bodies. Now I was even more dismayed by how passive they all were. So hopeless. I
could practically hear a resonating hum from them all, a collective pleading as they
mutely begged to be freed.

I aimed my camera up at the tubes and cords that dropped from the ceiling to each
sleep shell, and a horrible idea occurred to me. Freedom didn’t have to come from
waking up. It could come by death.

Don’t do this. Get out of here.

She was right. I could not think that way, but a strange immobility was taking hold
of me.

In the closest sleep shell, a child lay sleeping. She was a slight girl of five or
six—younger than Dubbs. Her stringy hair was smoothed back from her face and her eyelids
were thick with gel, like the others, but she was different. She was fresh. A nasty,
recent wound that ran across her forehead was held together with butterfly bandages.
A tinge of color livened her cheeks and lips. She even had a hint of a tan.

Tucked in the corner of her elbow, like a cruel joke, was a small teddy bear.

My throat tightened up, and my hold on the video camera faltered. I carefully slid
open the lid. The girl didn’t move. I shifted her gown to look beneath. One fine tube
led into her abdomen, and another led to her groin.

“Stop,” Dean Berg said. He braced a hand against the doorjamb, gasping for breath.
“Don’t touch her.”

I shot my gaze to the elevator beyond the glass. The elevator doors were closed, so
he must have moved my shoe. Other people could be coming soon. He touched a dial switch,
and the overhead lights came on.

“Don’t touch her,” he repeated. “For heaven’s sake, don’t touch any of them.”

“What kind of animal are you?” I asked. “Look at these people!”

Dean Berg was still heaving for air. He licked his lips and raked his hair back from
his forehead. His complexion was patchy with color and he gleamed with sweat. “You
have to come out of here. You’re disturbing them. We can talk, I promise. Just come
on out.”

Instead, I looped the strap of my camera around my neck, reached into the sleep shell,
and scooped up the girl. She was far too light to be healthy.

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Dean Berg said, staggering forward. “Be careful!”

I steadied the girl’s head against my shoulder and slid my other arm under her knees
to lift her body against mine. I caught the lines of IV in one hand, preparing to
yank them out of the sleep shell. With my pinky, I snagged the bear, too. “Stay out
of my way,” I said. “I’m taking her up.”

He came to a stop. “You can’t! She’ll die! What are you doing?”

“Where are her parents?” I demanded.

“Her parents?
I’m
her parents,” Dean Berg said. “I’m all their parents. You’ll kill her! Stop, please!”

I gripped the girl tight, but I didn’t pull her free. “Explain. How did you get this
girl?” I asked.

The dean wiped his hands on his Forge sweatshirt and set them lightly on the sleep
shell nearest to him. “Her name’s Gracie,” he said. “She was legally dead. She was
killed in a car accident a week ago. She had no brain function, period.”

“Then what’s she doing here?” I asked. “Why wasn’t she buried?”

“Her hospital moved her to the pre-morgue unit to wait out her demise and finalize
her paperwork, but I have contacts there, and when I got the call that she was dead,
I was able to bring her here and reignite her basic bodily functions. I saved her.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “Why didn’t you give her back to her parents?”

Dean Berg spoke with deliberate calm. “She doesn’t have any parents. She was an indigent
ward of the state. She was slotted for organ donations and research.”

“But she never died,” I said.

“She
did
die,” he said. “She’s
still
legally dead, but the minute she wakes up, of course I’ll return her to the state.
She’ll be a miracle. She’ll change everything.
I’ll
change everything.”

The girl in my arms was still breathing serenely, as if in a deep sleep. She was warm.
She smelled like she had been playing recently and wanted her nightly bath. I braced
her against the edge of the sleep shell, half in and half out, and glanced around
at the room.

“Have any of the others ever woken up?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But I’m close.”

“Dead people can’t come back to life,” I said. “You’re a sick, sick man.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “They’re content now. They’re even dreaming. Isn’t
that worth something?”

“How do you know they’re dreaming?” I asked.

He smiled. “Dreams are what I do. They’re my specialty.”

He was creeping me out, but he was also fascinating me.

“What about this one? What kind of dreams does Gracie have?” I asked.

His expression softened. “She dreams of swinging on her favorite swing. She pumps
her legs to go higher. She’s wearing red party shoes and white anklets.”

“But
how
do you know?” I asked.

“Because I’ve read her brain waves. I reignited her brainstem. That’s what we do here.
We give these people a dream life that’s only inches away from reality.”

“How do you know it’s what they want?”

“I don’t know that it
isn’t
,” he said.

“You know it’s wrong or you wouldn’t keep them hidden,” I said.

“I’m keeping them hidden to protect them now. I have to. There’s no going back,” he
said. “They’re my responsibility. I’ve made a commitment to these people.”

I shook my head. “We’re in the basement of a
school
. This is the last place these people should be. How can you possibly take care of
them?”

Dean Berg stepped slowly to the side. I took another glance toward the elevator lobby
to see that we were still alone.

“The school and the dreamers go together,” he said. “Students like you are so young
and so creative. Your dreams are incredibly vivid and powerful. They can grow in anything.”

“You put our dreams in these people?” I asked.

He nodded. “My dreamers are like a farm. We can put a seed dream from you in them,
and it takes root. It grows. Slowly and repetitively, but it grows.”

“From me, personally?”

“Yes,” he said, and smiled again. “I believe I’m safe in saying you have, by far,
the most fecund dreams I’ve ever mined.”

I was not flattered. “How many other students have you mined?”

“Over the past few years? A few dozen. Some only once. Some more often. We’re getting
better at it, definitely.” He stroked his hand along the lid of one sleep shell and
walked slowly to the next.

“Do you do the opposite? Do you put their dreams in me and the other students?” I
asked.

He nodded again. “Your young minds are unbelievably receptive,” he said. “Anything
we seed into students upstairs takes off like wildfire, and unlike with our dreamers
down here, we get to see results once you wake up. We see the effects from the subconscious
to the conscious within a day or two, sometimes hours. It’s incredible.”

“That’s worse than brainwashing,” I said.

His shoulders straightened. “It’s nothing like brainwashing,” he said. “We ignite
your creativity with a spark, just an image or a movement we find especially evocative,
but you make the ideas completely your own. You develop them. That’s the beauty of
it.”

“How?” I asked. “How do you see the results?”

“Henrik took his classical percussion and combined it with dance to set it free. Janice
is gender-bending
Hamlet
. It’s brilliant.”

“What about me? What did you seed in me?”

Dean Berg smiled with genuine pleasure. “You don’t even know, do you? It feels completely
natural.”

“Was it something in the observatory?” I said again.

He lifted a finger to shake wisely. “See, I noticed your interest in the observatory.
One of my dreamers down here was perseverating on a hanging. Her father’s hanging.
I wanted to see if I could make that resonate in you if I triggered it with Clarence’s
death.”

“How could that possibly be a good thing?”

“For one thing, it showed me how receptive your mind is, how thin the barrier is between
your conscious and your subconscious. The seed also helped you come up with your ghost
hunting idea,” Dean Berg said.

I held still, trying to remember. I had been inspired about the ghost angle when I
was down in the shop, with Muzh. But I already knew I wanted to spy on the school
before that, and the ghosts were just my cover. “No. The ghost hunting was my idea.
I had that earlier, before we went in the observatory.”

“You sure? How about your idea to spy on the school, which was a very clever reversal,
incidentally,” he said. “Where’d you get that idea?”

I thought back. “I can’t remember when I was inspired for every idea.”

“I can tell you,” he said. “It was the morning after we gave you a booster sedation
intravenously. You noticed that, surely. Jerry is convinced you were fully awake before
he sedated you. We seeded you that night. In the morning, your camera was hanging
in your wardrobe, facing toward the dorm. I watched your little ‘aha!’”

I remembered then. My idea to spy on the school had seemed like a fabulous breakthrough.
“Wait. Are you saying you
wanted
me spying on you?” I asked.

“I wanted you to feel like you were doing something,” Dean Berg explained. “I knew
you were suspicious about why we were taking out your friends at night, and I wanted
you to feel you were taking action. Then, once you started filming the dorm at night,
we just had to be careful to patch your footage. It wasn’t a problem.”

“You came to my sleep shell. You stole my camera and erased my footage.”

“I left that to Dr. Ash.”

“But she messed up,” I said. “Burnham and I saw the splice cut. We saw the light at
the bottom of the pit in the clock tower, too.”

“Those were mistakes,” he admitted. “Burnham was far more astute than I’d expected,
but even those mistakes didn’t prove anything. You kept doubting yourself with no
concrete evidence of the mining. That’s where I wanted you. That was the sweet spot.”

“Sweet spot?” I said. “You’ve wanted me to know what you’re doing? What could that
possibly do for you?”

A soft thump came from the far side of the room.

“Please, keep your voice down!” Dean Berg whispered urgently. “Put the girl back down.
You don’t want to hurt her. Come out with me.”

“Not until you answer my question. Why did you want me to know?” I asked.

“I wanted you aware of the
concept
of the dream mining,” Dean Berg said. “I wanted your mind to play around with it,
and you did. Your awareness has made your dreams keen like I’ve never seen before.
You’re like a magician who knows how the magic is done, or a doctor operating on herself.
You’re the dreamer who knows her dreams are mined. Can’t you feel it? Don’t you realize
how different you are?”

I recoiled.

Does he mean you?
I asked.

She didn’t answer. I needed her and she didn’t answer.

“You changed me just so you could rip out my dreams,” I said.

“It’s beautiful, what I’ve done,” he said. “It’s medicine and art, together.”

I shifted Gracie in my arms and looked down at her rounded cheeks and gently parted
lips. A soft breath escaped her. I hugged her harder, glaring back at Dean Berg. One
thing I knew: he wasn’t an artist.

“Those students you mine and seed, they’re the ones who commit suicide later, aren’t
they?” I asked.

“The students who killed themselves were perfectly fine while they were here,” he
said, shaking his head. “I’m certain.”

“How can you say that?” I asked. “They must have been damaged.”

He hesitated. “We haven’t gotten any of the old students back to do autopsies on them,
so I can’t say conclusively what happened to them.”

“But you know something, don’t you?”

The dean crossed his arms over his chest. “Very little. Dr. Ash has asked a few discreet
questions. Apparently, some of the suicides had problems with dizziness, déjà vus,
hallucinations, and hearing voices before they died. That’s not exactly hard evidence
of decay.”

“Decay?” I said. Those were my symptoms. I took a deep breath. “Is that what’s going
to happen to me? Am I going to kill myself?”

“You make it sound like that’s up to me.” He took another slow step nearer. “I watch
you all the time, Rosie. You can’t possibly guess how much I’ve grown to care for
you. I know you by heart, every minute, but that doesn’t mean I control you. You still
make your own choices.”

“I don’t want you to care for me,” I said, disgusted. “You’re never touching me again.”

“I’m afraid you’re wrong about that. Your mind, at least, is far too appealing for
me to resist.”

“You’ll have to. I’m going to end this now,” I said. “I don’t care where you put me,
what hospital or whatever. I’m going to tell people what you’ve done.”