The Forgotten Room

27

Stifling a yawn, Taylor Pettiford walked into Lux’s elegant dining room and looked around a little blearily. The room had been set up in the standard breakfast arrangement: long, buffet-style counters along one wall, while the rest of the room was filled with the usual round tables covered in crisp white linen.

Pettiford got in line at the buffet, grabbing a tray and a plate and helping himself to his favorite breakfast: freshly squeezed orange juice, black coffee, a Gruyère and fines herbes omelet from the attendant at the omelet station, three sausage links from one steam tray, five rashers of bacon from another, and a croissant from the overstuffed bakery basket. Carefully balancing the alarming load, he glanced around the room for a place to sit. There, at a table in the near corner, he saw his friend and fellow sufferer, Ed Crandley. He maneuvered his way over and plopped down in the seat beside Crandley.

“Another day in the salt mines,” he said.

Crandley, mouth full of pain au chocolat, mumbled a reply.

Pettiford took a sip of coffee, a mouthful of orange juice, and then froze. There, across the room, was Roger Carbon: the reason he was so tired this morning. Carbon was sitting with the thin, birdlike Laura Benedict, the quantum engineer who shared an office adjoining Carbon’s. Pettiford believed Benedict didn’t especially like Carbon, and guessed she’d sat with him simply because she was too kindhearted to see him eating alone.

Roger Carbon. Lux, as everyone knew, was the country’s most prestigious think tank. When, fresh from U. Penn with a newly minted degree in psychology, Pettiford had won a year’s position as an assistant at Lux, he felt like he’d just won the lottery.

How little he’d known.

Actually, he thought as he downed the first piece of bacon, that wasn’t quite fair. Lux had a reason for its sterling reputation, and a lot of excellent scientists and researchers passed through its doors, producing high-quality work. And many interns and assistants had pretty decent experiences there as well. Take Ed Crandley, for example: he had a good enough gig, working for a fair-minded, well-regarded statistician.

It had been Pettiford’s own bad luck to catch Roger Carbon for a boss.

Upon arriving at Lux, Pettiford had been unprepared for a man like Carbon: unprepared for his withering sarcasm, his impatience and impetuousness, his quickness to find fault and seeming blindness to a job well done. Instead of handing Pettiford interesting assignments, or trusting him to help with the raw research, Carbon treated him the way a marquee Ivy League professor might treat his lowliest research assistant. Just the night before, Pettiford had been up until 2 a.m., cross-checking bibliographic citations for Carbon’s latest monograph.

Ah, well. Shit happens. Pettiford polished off his second strip of bacon, his mood improving as his thoughts turned to plans for the upcoming weekend. Half a dozen of the assistants were going to converge on a popular singles bar overlooking the Newport boat basin. Such an outing was a rare thing — the volume of work, coupled with the way Lux frowned on intermingling with the local townspeople — and it had taken Pettiford a fair amount of time to put it together, wheedling, cajoling, promising to buy the first two rounds.

“You’re still in for Saturday night, right?” he asked Crandley, with a leer and a nudge.

“Oh, yeah.”

“You know, I haven’t been out of this place in six weeks. I think I’m getting cabin fever.”

“That’s because you didn’t bring a car.”

“The orientation literature urged us not to, and—”

There was a commotion on the far side of the dining room — a raised voice, a burst of animated talk — and Pettiford looked up. It was the historiographer, Dr. Wilcox. He was standing up, burly and easily six feet four, hands outstretched, his tablemates looking on.

Pettiford shrugged. In a place that took itself as seriously as Lux, Wilcox was an anomaly: a laid-back guy with a flair for melodrama, even at times a ham. No doubt he was entertaining the table with something out of his endless fund of stories and off-color jokes. Pettiford speared a sausage link and turned back to Crandley.

“It’s a conspiracy,” he said, picking up where he’d left off. “That’s what it is. First, they situate this place just far enough from town that you can’t reasonably walk in. Then they suggest — strongly — that you don’t bring your own transportation. They don’t pay us much — such an honor to be here, and all that — so we’re not likely to have the dough for regular cab fares. Get the picture? We’re indentured servants.”

“This paranoia is something new,” Crandley said. “Maybe you ought to have a skull session with your pal Dr. Carbon over there.”

“Are you kidding? Carbon? That would be the last straw.” And Pettiford shuddered in mock horror.

Suddenly, there was another commotion from the far side of the room — this one much louder. Pettiford looked over quickly. It was Wilcox again. He was shouting something, and Pettiford could tell instantly that this was no joke, no amusing anecdote: the historiographer’s eyes were so wide that all he could see was the whites, and the froth that flew from his mouth flecked his generous beard with foam. There were gasps around the room; people rose from their chairs; one or two made for the exit.

Through his surprise, Pettiford began to make out what Wilcox was shouting. “Get them out!” he cried. “Get them out of my head!”

Wilcox’s tablemates were now gathering around him, speaking soothingly, urging him to sit down again. Several people from other tables — friends, acquaintances, Wilcox was a popular fellow — approached. Pettiford looked on, frozen in place, sausage halfway to his mouth. Now Wilcox fell silent, allowing himself to be led back to his seat. He sat down, then shook his head, like a horse trying to drive off a determined insect. There was a moment of stasis. And then, abruptly, he leapt to his feet again, roaring, his seat tumbling away behind him.

“Get them out!” he shouted. “They’re too sharp — they hurt. Get them out!”

Once again, a small crowd gathered around, trying to calm him. Easily freeing himself, the big man spun around, crying and roaring in obvious torment. He was now scratching desperately at his ears and, to his horror, Pettiford could see even at this distance flesh shredding under the man’s nails, the blood beginning to flow from long gashes.

Suddenly, Wilcox darted away from the table and — fists drumming at his ears — looked this way and that. For a moment, his gaze locked with Pettiford’s, and the assistant felt a stab of fear. Then Wilcox turned toward the long row of tables on which breakfast had been laid out. Shouting “Out of my head! Please, no more voices in my head!” he rushed toward the buffet. The waiters standing in position behind the offerings backed away nervously as he approached.

Wilcox ran toward the tables so violently, fists still pounding at his head, that the impact almost toppled the closest one backward. Everyone in the dining room except the frozen Pettiford was now on his feet, some rushing toward Wilcox, others running in the opposite direction. From the corner of his eye, Pettiford saw someone speaking frantically into a house phone.

Bellowing out increasingly inarticulate cries, Wilcox looked up and down the table, eyes jittering and rolling in his head. Then he darted forward, once again shaking off the well-intentioned hands of friends trying to restrain him, and grasped the steam tray holding the bacon Pettiford had helped himself to, not five minutes earlier. Batting the tray away with one swipe of his meaty paw, bacon flying in all directions, Wilcox grabbed the two small cans of jellied cooking fuel that sat flaming in the panel beneath. He scooped up one of the cans in each hand, roaring.

As he looked on, Pettiford suddenly had a dreadful, chilling premonition of what was about to happen.

The room was full of alarmed cries, shouts of dismay. But for the moment, Dr. Wilcox himself went silent. And then — quite deliberately — he jammed one container of canned heat into each ear. An instant later, he became vocal again: only now, the shouts of torment had been replaced with shrieks of pain.

Everyone had abruptly fallen back in shock and disbelief. Even the security guards who had come running into the dining room faltered, struck dumb by what had just occurred. Wilcox was lurching back and forth, purple gel flaming from both ear canals, his sideburns and beard catching fire as the fuel dribbled toward his jaw. Screaming ever louder, he slashed this way and that, sending plates of artisanal breads, jams, and marmalade flying away from the tables.

And then Wilcox stopped again. Not the screaming — that was now continuous — but his physical movement. It seemed to Pettiford, for whom the scene had now abandoned any semblance of reality and morphed into nightmare, that the man had seen something that caught his attention. Wilcox lurched forward once more, ears and beard still afire, and stopped before an industrial four-slice toaster. Bellowing at the top of his lungs, he plunged a hand into one of the four slots; depressed the machine’s toasting lever, powering its element; and then — with his free hand — grabbed a nearby pot of steaming coffee and poured it directly into the unit.

Flames; a blue arc of electricity that rose like a single-colored rainbow above the serving table; a universal, room-wide cry of shock and horror, overridden by a single, larynx-shredding ululation of pain — and then the convulsing form of Wilcox was obscured by a rising pall of smoke.

Above all the noise, a sudden thud sounded to Pettiford’s left. Crandley had fainted.