by John Saul
Her body failed to respond.
Like her eyes, it no longer seemed to be there at all!
Another scream welled up out of the black abyss, another scream that echoed only in her mind, quickly dying away in the strange blackness around her.
Her panic threatened to overwhelm her now, but just before she succumbed to it, just an instant before it would have shattered her terrified mind, she staved it off once more, certain that if she gave in to the panic, she would never emerge from it again.
The panic was like a living thing now, lurking around her, a black, unseeable Hell filled with unknowable terrors that wanted to consume her, wanted to envelop her, drowning her forever in her own fear.
The panic was like a precipice, a towering cliff upon whose edge she teetered, part of her being drawn downward, wanting to give herself to the long final plunge, while another part of her insisted that she back away, that she retreat from the brink, pull back before it was too late.
Slowly, imperceptibly, she drove the fear back.
There was a reason for what was happening to her, an explanation for the terrible feeling of being mired alone in boundless darkness.
She wanted to cry out for her mother, to scream in the night for her mother to help her, but already she knew it would do no good.
Her mother wouldn’t hear her, for she couldn’t even hear herself.
And her mother was home. Home in Los Angeles. While she was at the Academy. But she’d been going home.
She’d told Hildie she wanted to go home, and Hildie had taken her to call her parents.
But she hadn’t talked to her parents. She’d been in Hildie’s office, and …
She strained her memory, searching for an image of what had happened.
An image came to her.
A glass of water.
Hildie had handed her a glass of water, and she’d drunk it down. And then everything was blank, until she’d awakened in the horrible blackness.
Drugged.
Hildie must have put something in the water.
What?
She began to think about it. A drug. Some kind of medicine. What kind?
Narcotics. Sleeping pills.
As she enunciated the words in her mind, new images took shape. The blackness was still there, surrounding her, but now lists of words began to formulate in her mind, almost as if she was visualizing them.
She concentrated, and the words came into sharper focus.
Thorazine.
Darvon.
Halcion.
Bercodan.
The words popped at her out of the darkness, words she hadn’t even known she knew. And yet she not only recognized the words, but knew the definitions of all of them.
They were drugs. Painkillers, and sleeping pills, and medicines to tranquilize you. As they flicked through her mind, she realized that she knew exactly what each of them was for and what each would do to someone, depending on how much was taken.
The sensation was strange. It was almost as if she were reading from some kind of book that existed only in her mind.
Like the way she solved complex mathematical problems by picturing the problem in her head, then working it out as if she held a pencil in her hand, the image never fading, her mind never releasing the proper position of a number until she’d found the solution.
Or when she took a history test, and answered the questions by summoning up an image of the text she’d studied, mentally flipping through the pages until she found the right one, then simply reading the answer off it.
The simple process of thinking seemed to make the panic recede a little, and Amy began focusing her mind on the problem of what had happened to her.
The darkness was still there, surrounding her, but she found she could force it back by imagining things, seeing things in her mind’s eye that she could no longer see with the eyes she had been born with.
She pictured a beach, a broad expanse of sand, with brilliant sunlight pouring down from a perfectly clear blue sky, and gentle surf lapping at the shore.
She put herself into the picture and imagined her feet buried in the sand, feeling its warmth between her toes.
Birds.
There should be seabirds in the image. But what kind?
Instantly, unbidden, images of birds came into her head, birds she’d never seen before, even in books. And yet they were there, all of them, and as she gazed first at one and then at another, information about each of them appeared in her mind.
Their size, their coloring, the parts of the world they were native to. Even images of their nests, complete with eggs.
But where was it coming from? It was almost as if—
Her mind froze as a concept suddenly took form, a concept she rejected in the instant it occurred to her.
And yet …
She remembered a computer she’d seen, not more than a month ago. A CD-ROM display, in which an entire encyclopedia had been put onto one disk, all of it digitized and cross-referenced, so all you had to do was bring up an index on the screen, then begin clicking a mouse, moving deeper and deeper into the volumes of information, looking at pictures, studying charts and graphs, even listening to snatches of music or speeches given by people who had died long before she had even been born.
It had seemed magical to Amy, and she had pleaded with her father to buy it for her, but he had only smiled his mysterious smile and suggested that perhaps it was something she might ask Santa Claus for.
She had known instantly that she was going to have it, that her father was going to get it for her for Christmas, and she had put it away in the back of her mind, knowing it was coming, knowing that in just a few months she would have the player and disk herself, attached to the computer that was waiting in her bedroom.
Attached to the computer.
And now what was happening in her mind was almost exactly like what had happened when she’d manipulated the mouse through the encyclopedia on the disk. Except her brain was the mouse.
Her mind began racing, images forming, making connections to other images, dissolving and reforming.
A computer mouse.
A real mouse.
A mouse in a cage.
Cat in a cage. Cat being tortured, being given choices.
Herself being given choices.
The high diving board; the knotted rope. The feeling of panic overwhelming her.
Tears.
Herself, crying, running from the swimming pool.
Experiments.
Experiments about intelligence, about reactions, about choices.
Choices she couldn’t make.
She’d wanted to leave, and Hildie had said she could.
And Hildie had given her a drug. A massive amount, enough to knock her out.
So she couldn’t leave. But they couldn’t keep her like a prisoner, could they? Her parents would come looking for her. Her mother would want to know where she was.
More images.
A funeral.
Adam Aldrich’s funeral.
His mother, crying.
Crying for her son, who had died.
Died?
Was she dead? Was that what had happened? No. Not dead. If she was dead, she wouldn’t be alone. She knew what Heaven was like, she’d pictured it in her mind hundreds of times. It was a soft, grassy hill, covered with wildflowers and small animals. At the top there was a brilliant shaft of light, like a rainbow, shining down from a cloudless sky, and angels were waiting for her. Angels she knew—her grandmother and grandfather, who had died when she was so small she almost didn’t remember them. But if she was dead, they would be there at the top of the hill, waiting for her in the light of the rainbow, their arms stretched out to her to gather her in and hold her, welcoming her to the new place where she had gone to live.
What if she was wrong? What if she wasn’t in Heaven at all?
Hell?
Could the blackness surrounding her be Hell?
No! She
wasn’t bad, and she wouldn’t have gone to Hell! And if she was dead, she would feel it! She would know it! And she didn’t feel dead at all.
She felt alive, alive, but trapped in some kind of world she didn’t understand.
A world where she had no senses. She couldn’t see anything, or hear anything, or feel anything, or even smell or taste anything.
And yet she was alive. As if her mind was existing outside of her body.
Outside her body!
She began remembering things she’d heard, snatches of conversation.
“Maybe Adam’s not dead.”
“Maybe he’s just gone away.”
But they’d found his body.
His body, crushed by a train.
What would a train do if it hit a human body?
Instantly, figures began whirling through her head. The weight of a locomotive, and its speed.
The strength of bone.
She factored in a coefficient of flexibility and tensile strength.
The numbers churned with the speed of a computer, and suddenly she had the answer.
Adam’s skull would have been smashed and his brain crushed, killing him instantly.
If his brain was still in his skull at all.
But if his brain had been taken out of his body, as her body seemed to have been detached from her brain …
Her mind raced again, questions forming, answers appearing as quickly as the questions took shape.
Images of human anatomy flicked through her mind,data piling upon data, her mind receiving all of it, processing it, assimilating it.
She began to understand how the systems of her body worked.
And how little of it was needed to keep her brain alive.
Finally, in a moment of terrible clarity, she understood.
The blackness was real, for she no longer had eyes with which to see.
The silence was real, for she no longer had ears with which to hear.
Or fingers or toes, or tongue or throat.
No lungs with which to breathe, no heart to pump blood through the body she no longer possessed.
More data piled up, data that her unfettered mind sorted through with lightning speed.
Where was it coming from? Where could all the data have been stored? Not in her own mind, for most of it was unfamiliar to her, things she’d known nothing about.
Data banks.
It was coming from data banks, to which she now had access.
The moment came when Amy Carlson finally understood where she was.
She no longer existed in the world she’d lived in all her life, a world of people and animals and trees, with sights and sounds that filled her soul with joy.
Now she was alone, trapped in eternal darkness, surrounded by … what?
Facts.
Data.
Knowledge.
Bits of information, insignificant binary digits, flitting through a universe of electronic impulses.
But at the heart of the computer there was no powerful microprocessor constructed of silicon chips with millions of microscopic circuits etched on their surfaces.
Instead, the heart of this computer was a mass of biological tissue, far more complex than any microchip could ever be.
The heart of this computer was a brain.
Her brain.
Once again she screamed, a mighty burst of energy that exploded in her mind, spewing her rage into each of the tiny sensors that monitored every portion of her brain.
George Engersol and Hildie Kramer watched the monitor above the tank that held Amy Carlson’s brain with a combination of fascination and awe.
The graphs seemed to have exploded, and colors blazed over the screen like fireworks, reds and purples bursting into greens and oranges, wave after wave of hues mixing together, separating, then dying away, only to be replaced with new patterns, patterns that weren’t patterns at all, but graphic representations of the turmoil within Amy’s mind.
“What is it?” Hildie breathed. “What’s happening to her?”
Engersol’s eyes remained fixed on the monitor as he watched the results of his years of research.
“I think she just figured out where she is and what’s happening to her,” he said. “The question is whether she’ll survive it, or whether it will drive her insane.”
Hildie frowned. “But what about Adam? He survived, didn’t he?”
Engersol’s lips curled into a smile that was totally devoid of warmth. “But there’s a difference, isn’t there? Adam knew exactly what was going to happen to him, and where he would be when he woke up.”
He was silent for a moment, then spoke again. “And of course Adam wanted to go. Amy didn’t.”
22
Margaret Carlson wondered how much longer she could hold herself together. She was sitting on a chair in Hildie Kramer’s office, having ignored Hildie’s gesture toward the sofa when the housemother had ushered her in five minutes ago. Frank had disdained the sofa as well, pacing nervously around the office, finally standing at the window, his back to the room, as if by refusing to face Hildie, he could refuse to face what she was telling them as well. Margaret, though, had chosen to perch on the edge of a straight-backed chair, her spine held perfectly erect, as if the act of holding her body in complete control could cause her to master her emotions as well.
She was on the verge of hysteria.
She knew it, for all around her the tendrils of reaction to the news she had heard by telephone early this morning kept reaching out to her, curling around her, drawing her toward an abyss of grief from which she wasn’t certain she could ever emerge.
Until now she’d battled the hysteria by rejecting the facts, telling herself that it had to be some kind of mistake, that Amy couldn’t possibly be dead.
Throughout the long ride to the airport, inching along through the morning rush-hour traffic along the San Diego Freeway, she had clung to that single thought.
It’s a mistake. It’s not Amy at all. It’s someone else, another little girl with red hair.
On the plane to Monterey she had sat silently next to Frank, her hand clutching his, silencing him every time he spoke with a tightening of her fingers, until she could feel her nails digging into his flesh.
A shark attack.
Frank had told her what they had found on the beach, for immediately after talking to Hildie Kramer, he had called the Barrington Police Department, insisting on whatever details they might have.
Mutilated.
The body that had washed up had been mutilated almost beyond recognition. They didn’t know yet exactly how Amy had died.
“Ask them if they could be wrong!” Margaret had insisted as she hung close to Frank while he talked to the police, picking up the barest facts from his responses to whatever the man on the other end was saying. “Ask them if it’s possible there’s a mistake!”
They had reluctantly agreed that there was perhaps the slimmest possibility that the body wasn’t Amy’s. It was to that possibility that Margaret had clung, refusing to accept that her daughter—the only child she had, the only child she ever could have, since the cancer last year—was gone.
Now Hildie Kramer had destroyed that last, thin hope, telling her that there was no longer any doubt that the little girl who had been delivered up by the sea that morning was Amy. And yet the hysteria she had been battling for almost four hours was still at bay as a strange numbness began to spread through Margaret’s body, beginning somewhere in the pit of her stomach and spreading outward until a bloodless chill seemed to invade even her fingertips. “How?” she breathed. “How did it happen?”
Hildie Kramer shifted in her chair, carefully arranging her matronly features into the expression she habitually wore for sessions like this, when she had to project the feeling that the loss of the child was almost as devastating to her as it was to the child’s parents. “She was upset yesterday,” she began, knowing she was going to have to tell the Carlsons what had happened, but c
hoosing her words carefully to put it in the best possible light Slowly, she related the experiment in which Amy had participated, stressing that Amy’s part in it had been purely voluntary. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that she burst into tears at the end of it. Apparently she thought she’d somehow failed, although the experiment wasn’t a test at all. It was simply an exercise in determining the manner in which people make decisions. At any rate, I talked with her for quite a while, and got her calmed down. But apparently she went off by herself after our talk. I’m afraid we lost track of her then.”
Frank Carlson turned away from the window, his eyes fixing on Hildie. “Lost track?” he echoed. “I’m sorry, but I think you’d better tell me exactly what that means.”
Hildie took a deep breath. “It means we couldn’t find her. She left the campus and simply disappeared. We had security guards searching for her all night, and several people on our staff were looking, too. Even one of the students was involved.”
Margaret Carlson’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You mean Amy was missing last night?” she demanded. “And you didn’t call us?”
Hildie shrugged helplessly. “I should have, though I’m not sure what it would have accomplished. The police were notified, but frankly, with the way things are now, it’s impossible to get any positive action from them unless a child has been missing for twenty-four hours, or there is immediate evidence of some sort of—well, foul play, if you will.”
“So you did nothing,” Frank Carlson said, his voice heavy. “You sat by while my daughter died.”
“We did everything we could, Mr. Carlson,” Hildie said, allowing a note of authority to creep into her voice as she tried to regain control of the conversation. “If it had been up to me—”
“But what happened?” Margaret broke in. “I still don’t know how she got into the water.”
Hildie’s tongue ran nervously over her lower lip. “The police are still investigating the matter, but it appears that one of our teachers—Steven Conners—must have found Amy, late last night or early this morning.”
Margaret Carlson gasped. “He found her?” she breathed. “But if he found her—” She fell silent, suddenly confused. “Where is he? Why didn’t he—”
