Tap. Tap. Tap. Even without a surface to knock against, his body continued the pattern. They walked down the corridor toward the stairs.
As they passed door 12, the boy stopped. The blue light was brighter than Agnes had ever seen it. It seeped around the edges of the door, pulled on the flagstones, climbed the walls. And the writing, the hundreds of entries that covered the room surfaces, was visible through the cracks, glowing with a cold luminescence that made the corridor feel like it was underwater. The boy stood in front of room 12 and placed his free hand flat against the door.
"They are all in there," he said. "Everyone who was ever taken. Everything that was ever lost. Every name, every face, every thought that a child ever had before the doctor spoke it away." He pressed harder.
The door shuddered.
"And they are not at peace. He told you they were at peace, but he lied. They are not at rest. They are not gone. They are collected, gathered, stored, and they are aware."
Agnes tried to pull him away. He did not move.
For a boy of nine, he was immovable. "I can hear them," he said.
"Every night. Not through the walls, not through the door, through my bones, through the spaces where my memories used to be. The emptiness inside me is not empty. It is a doorway. And they're on the other side of it, pressing against it, trying to come through."
He turned to look at her. His eyes were fully black, not just dilated. Black from edge to edge, as if the darkness of the room he had lived in for two and a half years had saturated his eyes like ink in water.
"The tapping is not me," he said. "It was never me. It is them. Hundreds of them knocking, and every day the door gets thinner."
What happened next is the part of Agnes's account that even Pritchard admitted he could not verify, corroborate, or explain. He included it in his thesis because it was there in the journals written in Agnes's hand, and because the physical evidence, what little of it remained, did not contradict it.
Agnes dropped the boy's hand. The moment she released contact with him, the blue light in room 12 went out. Not gradually, instantly, as if someone had thrown a switch. The corridor was plunged into near darkness, the single gas lamp at the far end sputtering and dimming as though the air itself had grown thicker. And the tapping started again.
But not from the boy, from every door, all 12 of them simultaneously. Tap, tap, tap. A three-second pause, then tap, tap, tap, synchronized perfectly in time. 12 rooms, 12 doors, 12 children, all tapping the same rhythm at the same moment. Except that when Agnes had looked through the hatches on previous visits, several of the rooms had been empty. There should not have been 12 sources, but there were.
The boy in room seven stood very still. He was looking down at his own hands. They were shaking. "It is starting," he said. Agnes asked what was starting.
"The door is open," he said. He did not mean the door to room seven. He did not mean the door to room 12. He meant something else entirely, and Agnes, in her journal, admitted that she understood what he meant, and that understanding was the most frightening moment of her life. He meant the door inside himself, the emptiness where his identity had been, the hollow space that Dr. Ness had created when he stripped the boy of every memory, every detail, every trace of who he had been.
That space was not a void. It was a passageway, and something was coming through it. Not one thing, many things. Agnes wrote that the temperature in the corridor dropped so sharply that she could see her own breath. The gas lamp at the end of the corridor guttered once and went out.
In the darkness, the only light came from the boy. A faint blue glow, the same color as room 12, emanating from his skin, from his eyes, from the spaces between his fingers. The tapping grew louder, faster. The three-second pauses shortened to 2 seconds, then 1, then there were no pauses at all. Just a continuous hammering rhythm from every direction, reverberating off the stone walls, filling the corridor with a sound like a hundred hearts beating at once.
The boy looked at Agnes. "Run," he said. She ran. Her feet slipped on the damp flagstones. She caught herself against the wall and kept moving.
The corridor behind her was filling with sound. Not just tapping now, but something deeper, something that vibrated in her teeth and in the bones of her skull. A hum. A pressure. The sound of 300 voices compressed into a frequency just below hearing.
She made it to the stairs. She made it up the 12 steps. She pushed through the iron door and into the courtyard, and she slammed it shut behind her, and she threw her weight against it, and she screamed. She screamed because the tapping had not stopped. It had followed her.