I’M NOT sure what I was expecting. Maybe an enormous supervillain’s lair, or an alien spaceship hovering the center of a room, or a giant box that said, “Secret of Innsmouth” in large letters, or a wall covered with elaborate explanations of a conspiracy with the words “Secret Plans” written above all of them. But that’s a lot.

I know it sounded silly, but I was expecting my mom and my dad, sitting at our kitchen table, chatting as if nothing happened. In my heart the secret of the room was that everyone I loved was innocent and they got to live happily ever after.

Instead, I found a room more like a giant hospital ward, filled with rows of beds, spaced widely apart, about forty of them. Each bed had elaborate monitoring equipment, monitors, wires, tubes, accordion bags pumping up and down, a large circle cast a red laser field around each bed. We moved as one, walking up to the nearest bed, and slowly, very slowly, looking at its occupants.

I think I would have preferred to see a monster instead of what I did. It was a kid. Our age. Her face was delicate. Her features lax. She was completely immobile except for the slow rising and falling of her chest, which was in time with the bag pumping up and down next to her bed. She seemed alive but completely catatonic. Not even her eyes moved. I reached down to touch her but was shocked by the laser field and my hand recoiled.

“What do you think happened to them all?” Alice asked.

“I have no idea,” Tape Deck said. “But I bet he does.”

He pointed down the long row of beds to the opposite end of the room. Sitting upright, eyes open, arms at his side, there was a boy. Staring at us. He seemed to be saying something but we couldn’t hear him.

Marcus held up his phone and zoomed in. The boy waved.

“Do you think he’s dangerous?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” said Tape Deck.

“Should we go over?” Alice whispered back.

“Quentin?” Kurt said loudly. He started rushing over to the bed. “Quentin, is that you?” I’d never seen Kurt excited about anything ever in his life.

When we got to the bed Quentin tried to tell us something but we couldn’t hear him. After a few more failed attempts he pointed to a small button next to the bed. Tape Deck pressed it and with a zzzz noise the laser shield retracted into the circle.

“Can you hear me now?!” Quentin screamed.

“Yes,” we all said back, covering our ears.

“Awesome. I didn’t realize that blocked noise. It’s mostly been me. They’re not much for conversation,” he said, pointing to his roommates. “So you got my messages?”“Messages?”

“Yeah, through the walls. Well, I guess you did. You got in,” he said more to himself. “My god, this is awesome.” He looked over at Tape Deck. “Glad I got to be a voice in your head, honey.” Tape Deck rolled her eyes. He swung his legs over the bed and stood up. As soon as he was up he slid down to the ground. We had to help him back up. “Quentin, by the way,” he said when he was upright, then he shook our hands vigorously. He grabbed Tape Deck’s hand with two hands over each other, like he really extra super duper meant it with her.

“How do you two know each other?” Johnny asked, pointing at Kurt.“Classmates at Innsmouth Junior High and High School,” Quentin said. “Well, until Special K got kicked out and got sent to RVS.”

“RVS?” I said.

“Retcon Vocational School,” Kurt said. “So Q, where’d you get that nifty power?”“Which one?”

“The ability to talk through walls.”

“It came with the bunch. To be honest I didn’t even know if it worked or not. I’m glad it did.”

“Wait, you couldn’t always do that?” Tape Deck asked.

“Nah,” Kurt said. “Q could walk through trees.”

“You could what?” I asked.

“I had some phasing abilities,” he said. “I could phase through wooden objects like trees, so long as they weren’t too big. And wooden doors.”

“Just wood?” Johnny asked.

“Yup. And not all wood. I had trouble with oak, which is annoying because everything old is made of oak,” he said. “But that’s in the past.”

I wondered what he meant by that. I was about to follow up when Marcus pointed his phone at Quentin and asked, “So how long have been here?” Marcus called himself a filmmaker lately. I had noticed that he took care to film each part of Innsmouth as we explored it.

“I don’t know. It feels like forever. Since the incident, I guess,” he said.

“Since the nuclear disaster?” Marcus followed.

“What nuclear disaster?” Quentin asked. He wasn’t lying to us. He looked genuinely confused, like a grandma just hearing about the Internet. It was the most baffling reaction. I didn’t know what to think about it. Obviously Innmouth had been through… something. But why would Quentin have no idea about what happened? Quentin held up his hand and a voice whispered “shhhh” inside my head. The same voice I had heard before, in the walls. “Get comfortable, this may take a little bit,” he said. “I should tell you the whole story. At least what I know.”

We sat on the ground around him. Marcus stayed standing. He positioned his phone and started recording again.