Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help (13 page)

“I don’t like this curing business,” said Milrose.

“Neither do I,” said Arabella.

“It doesn’t seem … positive.”

“No.”

“I mean, nobody ever gets actually Helped all that much, do they? Not according to the Wickter Scale.”

“I do not like that scale.”

“And then they’re suddenly cured.”

Both were thinking much the same thing. And that thing was close enough to the word
entombed
that it made them suddenly anxious to return to the Den before the wall deploded.

Deeply Damaged Dave had indeed provided for their return. It was difficult to lose their way, given Dave’s helpful (if somewhat extreme) navigational aids. He had arranged a series of (probably temporary) explosions, which occurred, one after another, every few minutes, to guide them in the proper direction. Just as they were becoming perplexed—as stumbling in the dark so often renders one—a bright flash and matching bang would ignite in the near distance, indicating where they ought to go next. (Dave counted on Milrose being one of those few people who make their way
towards
explosions.)

In this intermittently dramatic manner—every explosion caused them to flinch, if not jump—they at last found their way back to the hole in the floor, beneath which could be glimpsed the tower of beds.

The rope ladder had disappeared: could Dave have neglected this one detail, after being so careful with his pyrotechnics? But the topmost bed was not very far below, so they counted to three and jumped.

They landed with a soft sproing. A mere second later they heard a noise that can only be called the
opposite of an explosion (if you’ve never heard this noise, then you can’t really grasp how strange it is), and the ceiling deploded. Which is to say, all the bits of plaster lying on the bed beside them shot through the air to find their former places in the former ceiling; the plaster dust whooshed back into the places between those places; and the ceiling quickly became solid and whole and unexploded. It was impressive, if a touch unsettling—had they taken a second more to find their way back, or had counted to four before jumping, then they would never have been able to return to the den.

“I suppose we made it back in the nick of time.” Milrose stopped to ponder this. “What do they mean by ‘the nick,’ anyway?”

As breakfast was fast approaching, there seemed no point in going back to bed. Milrose and Arabella sat upon the bunk and tried to make sense of the evening’s adventure.

“I think this evening has been helpful,” said Arabella.

“You’re right: we learned helpful stuff. Dave will be pleased with our research.”

“What precisely have we learned, do you think?”

“Um …” Milrose turned this over in his mind. “Well … I guess we know that people get sentenced to Help for seeing ghosts.”

“We do not really know that. All we know is that everyone sentenced to Help
does
see ghosts. We have no proof that this is
why
they are sent here. And we can’t really speak for everyone. We didn’t read all the files.”

“You’re nitpicking.”

“One of us has to.”

“Why? And what’s a nit?”

“I think it’s a small bug.”

“Well,” said Milrose, “you keep picking small bugs. (What does that
mean?)
And I’ll continue to assume that everyone is sent here precisely because they see ghosts. In fact, I bet they do this to everyone who shows that ability. I mean, you and I are the only people I know who are aware of our dead friends, and guess what: we’re in Help.”

“I’ll grant you that.”

“And I think it’s safe to say that Help is designed to cure this condition. Not simply the hearing of supposedly non-existent voices. The actual seeing of ghosts.”

“Okay. That is in fact borne out by the files.”

“And, furthermore, it’s pretty clear that Help is completely useless in that respect. All the files seemed to suggest that patients kept up their conversations with the dead, no matter what was done to them.”

“Until they got … cured.”

“Yes.”

They both shuddered.

“Let’s see,” said Milrose, veering away from that gruesome subject. “We also know a bit more about why they’re concerned about
us,
in particular.”

“I don’t think we know anything useful.”

“Well, apparently I’m a born leader. That’s something. Whoever wrote my file seemed particularly annoyed by that.”

“True. Frightened, even. You’re a ‘danger.’”

“Who knew,” said Milrose. “Of course, I’ve never led anyone anywhere in my life.”

“If you were born to lead, you have lots of time to start. I’m sure many people start leading later in life.”

“Thank you. And I like to think of myself as a danger.”

“Of course.”

“I bet we’re
both
dangers.”

“Do you think so?”

They stopped speaking in order to briefly enjoy that thought.

“Um, Arabella? Speaking of … well, danger … how many days have we been in Help?”

She started counting on her fingers. “About thirty-six.”

“About? I suspect we want an exact number.”

“I’m not good with numbers.”

“Because the files are kind of unwavering when it comes to the date of the cure. Forty-two days and you’re done.”

“I’m almost sure it’s thirty-six.”

“Then I’m almost sure we’re gonna be cured six days from now.”

They lapsed into an unhappy silence, as neither could think of anything much to say. Among the many things in the world they did not desire, this was now chief: they did not want to be cured.

O
NE DISTRESSING ASPECT OF
M
ASSIMO
N
ATICA’S DECLINE WAS THE GROWING INCOHERENCE OF HIS THERAPEUTIC STRATEGIES
. W
HILE ONCE MERELY SILLY AND INEFFECTIVE, WHAT
M
ASSIMO WAS HAVING THEM DO NOW WAS MORE IN THE LINE OF DANGEROUS AND UNPRINCIPLED.

“I sense that you do not trust me,” said Massimo Natica over breakfast. This was perhaps his first truly accurate observation.

“Aw, Massimo. How could you possibly come to such a depressing conclusion?”

Natica ignored Milrose, as if that last remark were somehow not sincere. “This is not normal.
Normal
children trust adults in positions of authority. So, we are going to work on this. Trust.” He smiled one of
his least appetizing smiles. “Now, before you trust me, you must learn to trust each other.”

“But we already do,” said Milrose.

“We shall see,” said Massimo Natica.

In order to ensure that Milrose and Arabella were not abnormally suspicious of each other, they were now to engage in exercises devoted to “interpersonal trust.” Milrose had heard of such exercises, which were popular in drama classes: a blindfolded actor would tilt forward, so that—if not caught by a fellow student—he would plant his face fully and painfully in the floor. This was meant to instill trust between students. You simply
expected
your fellow actor to catch you before you crushed your nose. Sometimes these experiments could become fraught with something less than trust: if, for instance, the guy who was supposed to catch you was also competing with you for the lead in the next play. Or, worse, the catcher had an eye on your girlfriend, and considered you the major obstacle to his romantic ambitions. Still, incidents of serious nasal impact were rare.

What Massimo was proposing, however, involved a considerable element of luck on top of the usual trust. Arabella was made to stand blindfolded against the one blank wall, while Milrose—also blindfolded—was made to rush at the wall, as if jousting, with the pitchfork held in front of him like
a lance. Arabella was to trust that Milrose would plant the pitchfork into the wall instead of into her.

Milrose did his very best not to impale Arabella on the end of his pitchfork, and Arabella did her very best not to be run through like a kebab, but neither could
guarantee
that this would not happen, no matter how deeply went their trust.

Of course, they did in fact trust each other deeply. And one positive consequence of this exercise—the
only
positive aspect—was that they seemed to bond further as they courted Arabella’s inadvertent murder. It was, in a truly sick and beautiful way, romantic.

Now you might of course wonder
why
Milrose and Arabella would allow themselves to be caught up in such an exercise. Unfortunately, Massimo’s powers of persuasion had not left him entirely, and when he
truly wished
for them to undergo a certain technique, they really had no choice in the matter. Massimo Natica could no longer pull this off consistently, but when manic obsession entered the picture, his talents returned. And he really, really wanted to witness this exercise in trust.

It became, to be precise, more of an exercise in prayer and strategy. Prayer for obvious reasons. Milrose Munce had never considered himself particularly religious, but he found himself praying with astonishing sincerity that he not be the cause of Arabella’s violent demise. Her death under any circumstances
would have driven him to an eternity of grief. Her death at his hands, however, would be infinitely worse. Truly bad, with no redeeming features whatsoever. Hence he prayed.

Her prayers were surprisingly different. You’d imagine that she’d focus mostly upon being run through like a quail on a spit—that her prayers would run along the lines of, “Please, Lord, let me not be skewered by a pitchfork.” Arabella’s prayers, however, were far more complex. For she cared mostly that her ghosthood not come at the hand and fork of Milrose Munce, simply because of the wilderness of eternal anguish it would cause him. If prayers are answered, even in the Den of Professional Help, it may well be for this strange reason: there was very little selfish in Arabella’s sincere wish to remain unpierced.

Strategy was the other main deterrent to the addition of yet one more kebab to this world. Milrose Munce would always indicate that he was about to set himself into motion by pawing the floor loudly with his foot, like a bull about to charge. Arabella, upon hearing this sound, would emit a subtle “eep,” which set in motion a sort of echolocation, so that Milrose might triangulate like a bat and aim in any other direction than eep-ward. This was the soundtrack to that operatic exercise in trust: paw, eep, gallop, thud. Perhaps more “thoock” than “thud,” as
the tines of the pitchfork would penetrate an inch or so into the wall.

Massimo watched with satisfaction.

That night, both had an inordinately difficult time getting to sleep—a consequence of terror—but once they succeeded, Arabella had a clarifying dream. It was about time. Unfortunately, upon waking, she could not remember it.

Arabella had a technique to deal with this, however. She closed her eyes and pretended that she was in fact asleep, and this, predictably, tricked the dream into coming back, like an abandoned dog, to nuzzle her eyeball.

And there she was again, vividly, in a full-length faux-ermine robe and a magnificent tiara (adornments she had barely noticed in the dream, as this was hardly unusual clothing); she was making a stately progress down the corridor of the dank, mushroomous basement. To either side were athletes, awed by her presence in their midst—they had briefly stopped giving each other wedgies; their bleating had diminished to a low snuffling murmur—and at the end of the corridor was a creature in a cage.

This was no ordinary creature. He was, perhaps, human, except that his forehead was so low as to barely exist: it was just tall enough to entertain eyebrows,
and these brute ornaments blended almost with the hair on his head. His nose was unlike most human noses, in that it had no definite shape: it was a sort of doorknob of cartilage, dominating the centre of his simian face. The neck, too, was simian, if in fact a bit wide relative to the neck of the average gorilla. And even the most vicious of the great apes had eyes displaying more warmth and intelligence than those glaring from above that blasted nose and behind those pitiless bars.

Arabella made her regal way between the ranks of sombre athletes towards this appalling beast. She held a key in her hand. And she realized, as she examined the dream, that she fully intended to use this key to free the monster from his cage.

It all makes sense, thought Arabella, upon opening her eyes. Although she could not figure out precisely what kind of sense it made, she was pleased to know that everything was now clear. After yawning, she shook her head to rid it of cobwebs (Arabella was not sure that her head contained actual cobwebs, but it seemed best to play it safe), and climbed the tower of beds to where Milrose was snoring. She poked him gracefully in the ribs. “Milrose!” she whispered.

He opened one eye, annoyed.

“Milrose Munce, I have had a clarifying dream!”

He closed the eye, and sighed. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

“You have to have more faith in my dream. Or I shall not tell it to you.”

“Fine. I’m thrilled that everything has come clear to you in your sleep. Dying to hear it. Really. Now tell me all.”

Arabella, although she was not at all fooled by this weary pledge of fascination, told him the dream anyway. When she finished, she noticed that Milrose was staring at her with amused disbelief.

“Arabella, that is the least clarifying dream I have ever heard.”

“I disagree. You just have a bad attitude.”

“But what has become clear?”

“I have no idea.”

“For this you woke me up …” Milrose turned away from Arabella, in fond annoyance. Then he suddenly perked up. “Hang on. You say he had a nose like a doorknob, this creature?”

“Yes. Precisely.”

“And his neck—was it … thicker than the average neck?”

“Oh, a tree trunk.”

“What about his forehead. Would you say that he had a
tall
forehead?”

“It was the least tall forehead I have ever encountered. It barely deserved the title ‘forehead.’ In fact, it’s only out of generosity that I’m calling that whole bulbous thing a head.”

“Sledge!” said Milrose.

“I beg your pardon?”