The Hypnotists

by Gordon Korman

  “Of course, no one’s a fan of the Nazis,” Ms. Samuels was saying, “but those officers with hypnotic power could avoid the use of less humane methods, like torture —”

  “It’s happening!” Jax exclaimed suddenly as the vision reappeared. As before, it was an extreme close-up of his eyes framed by a screen. Louder, “It’s happening!”

  Ms. Samuels tried to stare him into silence, but he was not to be denied.

  “I need Dr. Mako right now!”

  A foot kicked his chair from behind. “Can it, Dopus,” came Wilson’s voice. “Nobody cares what you need.”

  The vision was solidifying before his eyes, half blinding him. He rose unsteadily.

  “Sit down, Jax,” Ms. Samuels said gently.

  “I’m going to find him!” He stumbled out of the seminar and began flinging doors open up and down the hall.

  In one lab, Kira wheeled around in her chair, breaking her link with Mr. Kentucky. “You can’t barge in here like that!”

  “Where’s Dr. Mako?” Jax insisted.

  “Out!”

  Jax was heading for Lab 1 when a flying tackle cut the legs out from under him. Wilson picked him up by the scruff of the collar. “Got him!”

  “Bring him to my office,” Ms. Samuels called back.

  Jax struggled to break the iron grip. “Let go!”

  “Please.” Wilson sneered. “Put up a fight. This is turning into a really great day.”

  He sounded so genuinely thrilled that Jax came back to himself. Nothing would have pleased the bully more than a ready-made excuse to mash Jax to a pulp.

  By the time Jax took the seat opposite Ms. Samuels’s desk, the PIP had disappeared.

  “Thank you, Wilson,” she said. “Give my apologies to the group. I’ll return to the seminar in a few minutes.”

  “I’m not making this up,” Jax told her once Wilson was gone.

  “I believe you,” she acknowledged. “Yet you’re going to have to keep it to yourself until Dr. Mako has time to discuss it with you.”

  “Where’s Dr. Mako?” Jax demanded. “I can’t deal with this on my own.”

  The assistant director hesitated a moment. “This is just between you and me, agreed? Dr. Mako is helping Senator Douglas with his campaign. If he wins the New York primary, the nomination will be his. It’s really exciting.”

  “I thought Dr. Mako was interested in hypnotism, not politics.”

  “He’s interested in both,” she soothed. “To have one of our supporters holding high office would be a fantastic boost to the good work we do here.”

  And Jax had to agree. The question remained: How long would it be before he could get to the bottom of what was happening to him?

  The next vision came while Jax was having breakfast the following morning. It was so unexpected that he drew in a sharp breath and inhaled a mouthful of Raisin Bran. His father rushed over and began pounding him on the back.

  Mr. Opus took his son’s face in his hands and peered anxiously into his eyes — until he remembered and glanced quickly away. Even with Jax choking, he couldn’t risk placing himself in the line of fire of the old family talent.

  “You okay?” he tossed over his shoulder.

  Jax nodded, wiping soggy cereal off his chin. “Fine.” The clock on the stove read 7:33 AM. Who could be watching his video now?

  “Dad,” he asked, “did your parents ever video themselves?”

  Mr. Opus shook his head. “I’m not sure, but I doubt it. They were pretty elderly by the time home video came along.”

  “Yeah, but is it possible they used it to … hypnotize people?”

  Mr. Opus was horrified. “That works?”

  Jax backed off. It was bad enough that his dad was afraid to look his own son in the face. The last thing he wanted was for his poor father to suspect every newscaster and talking head on TV.

  It happened again during a social studies test in third period. There were Jax’s eyes, where his essay answer on West Virginia coal exploration was supposed to be. He waited for the vision to dissipate, but instead of fading out, it grew stronger, until he could clearly see his irises darkening from royal blue to indigo. This was no fleeting impression. This kind of PIP image only came during a serious and sustained mesmeric link. When was it going to stop?

  “Dude,” Tommy whispered from the next seat, “you look like you need to change your underwear.”

  So Jax’s distress was obvious to others as well. Only he didn’t feel particularly distressed. Annoyed, maybe. Concerned. And … jealous?

  Yes! Envy, the kind that kept you up nights and ate at your stomach lining. But who was he jealous of? Tommy? The other students who were able to write their test without interference?

  All at once, he knew. This wasn’t his envy. This emotion was coming through to him via the mesmeric link! The jealousy belonged to the person watching the video.

  If there had been any doubt in Jax’s mind that his clip was bending people, this blew it all away. And now it seemed that these remote hypnotisms could be every bit as powerful as the face-to-face kind.

  At lunch, he called Sentia, but Dr. Mako was still unavailable.

  “How many people are watching that clip I recorded?” he demanded of Ms. Samuels. “It can’t just be at the institute. I got blowback while I was eating breakfast at seven thirty!”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions until you’ve had a chance to speak to Dr. Mako,” the assistant director suggested.

  “And when’s that going to be?” Jax complained bitterly. “I just experienced a link as strong as anything I’ve ever felt at the institute.”

  But Dr. Mako was not at Sentia that day or all that week. The visions continued, the PIP images becoming so clearly defined that Jax could make out the pores in his own skin. He was bombarded with emotions that had him jumping for joy one minute, and close to tears the next. In math one day, he picked up a fit of giggles so uncontrollable that he was sent to explain himself to the principal.

  “What exactly was so funny?” Mr. Orenstein demanded.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Jax replied. It might have been the first time in the history of school that this stock answer was 100 percent true.

  It was as he left the office, stepping carefully, his eyesight still impaired, that the cause of his laughter came to him. He didn’t see it — the PIP before him was still his own two eyes. Yet he knew it, the way you can conjure an image in your imagination. It was Singh One, stepping into a crowded room dressed from head to toe in a fluffy white bunny suit. Nothing had ever been more hilarious.

  Correction, thought Jax. Nothing has ever been more hilarious to the person thinking this.

  This was a mesmeric link with Singh Two! But why was he watching Jax’s video?

  By now, the visions had become so frequent that Jax no longer bothered to report them to Ms. Samuels. He picked up the flavor of intense competitiveness along with an image of a tennis court that might have come from Grace. But he didn’t dare confront her. Until Dr. Mako made an official announcement that the threshold of remote hypnotism had been crossed, he had to keep a lid on this.

  On Saturday, he arrived at Sentia to the news that Dr. Mako was not there and, no, he wasn’t expected any time that day.

  For Jax, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. His frustration reminded him of his very first week here, filling out endless tests while no one would even tell him what the institute was about. Only when he’d threatened to quit had Dr. Mako suddenly found an opening in his schedule for the Opus family.

  Okay, maybe he had to try something similar now.

  “I’m going home,” he told Ms. Samuels. “Call me when Dr. Mako is ready to discuss what’s been happening to me.”

  “Jax, this is really not being a team player,” the assistant director warned.

  Jax tried to explain himself. “Nothing I could learn here today is half as important as what I have to tell Dr. Mako. Even if I stayed, I’d be useless to you.
”

  The elevator closed in front of him.

  He was on the subway, hurtling downtown, when another vision hit abruptly. The picture was the same — the close-up of his eyes had become as familiar as the network logo in the corner of a TV monitor. But the emotion that came with it was brand-new and shocking in its intensity.

  Hatred.

  Jax held on to the pole he’d been leaning against. The clip’s short, he told himself. It’ll pass.

  The PIP solidified into high definition, cutting off his view of his real surroundings. The strength of it — and its speed in revving up to full power — told him that this was going to be the most intense wave of blowback yet.

  He didn’t hear the word. It was more like it appeared in his mind.

  Dopus.

  He should have known. Who else hated Jax this much? Who else was capable of so much pure corrosive acid?

  Wilson.

  The impressions followed in a parade, a slide show of intimidation.

  “… at the corner of Forty-Fifth and Third … two AM …”

  Wilson’s voice.

  “We’ll meet at the corner of Forty-Fifth and Third …”

  Jax’s mind reeled. Wilson couldn’t be planning a rendezvous while watching the video. So why were these words bubbling out of his thoughts? Jax sensed urgency and excitement, mixed with a touch of fear. Whatever this was, to Wilson, it was daring and super-important.

  “… two AM tonight … Get this right and everyone can forget all about Jackson Opus….”

  “Me?” Jax blurted aloud.

  The vision dissipated, leaving him the object of curious stares from his fellow passengers. He glanced quickly away, only to notice that the train was pulling in to the Borough Hall station. He was in Brooklyn. Not only had he missed his stop, but also several others and a long tunnel into the next borough.

  Wilson’s words came back to him: Get this right and everyone can forget all about Jackson Opus.

  What was that supposed to mean? A plan, obviously. Some sort of conspiracy to hurt Jax. But what? At two in the morning, he would be fast asleep in a doorman building with his parents in the next room. How could he be in danger?

  Had Wilson figured out a way to reach him hypnotically? Through the blowback, maybe? Nobody was supposed to know about that. But Jax had been screaming it at Ms. Samuels for the better part of a week, so it wasn’t inconceivable that the news had gotten out.

  How was he vulnerable? He had no idea. None of this was supposed to be possible in the first place, so logical reasoning could only take you so far. According to Dr. Mako, there was no such thing as remote hypnotism, which meant there should be no such thing as blowback. But that didn’t change the fact that both were happening.

  Gathering his wits and his book bag, Jax raced out the double doors and crossed over to the opposite platform to catch the next Manhattan-bound train home. His thoughts continued to whirl. How seriously should he take Wilson’s words? Who had he been talking to? Jax had no way of knowing whether he’d “overheard” an actual conversation, or nothing more than the wishful thinking of a rotten jerk. Yet he was absolutely convinced that the threat was very real. There was something about Wilson’s malevolence — the fierceness of his ill will — that told Jax this was no false alarm.

  He had to find out.

  But how?

  Jax tiptoed through the darkened apartment, his sneakers in his hand, feet barely touching the floor. Mom and Dad were not light sleepers, but there was no explaining this little excursion, so he had to make sure they remained undisturbed.

  The clock on the cable box read 1:12 AM as he let himself out the door, gingerly shutting and locking it behind him. He took the elevator not to the lobby, but to the basement laundry room. The building’s front-desk staff wasn’t usually nosy, but a twelve-year-old venturing out in the middle of the night would have raised an eyebrow or two.

  He snaked through the gray cinderblock corridors, crawling on all fours past the entrance by the boiler room, where he knew there was a security camera. At the end of the hall was a heavy steel door leading to the alley. You couldn’t get in that way, but you could slip out.

  The streets were not deserted, but it was much quieter than in the daytime. Once on the avenue, Jax flitted three streets up and ducked down a block of apartments that had once been nineteenth-century tenements. The buildings had been redone, but the old-fashioned fire escapes were still there, the wrought iron freshly repainted.

  He stopped under the third house in and stood among the garbage cans, waiting. Soon, a low gonging sound told him someone was on the way down. The shadowy shape came into view, backlit by the streetlamp. The tall figure reached the end of stairway and whistled.

  “I’m here,” Jax called softly.

  The ladder at the bottom of the fire escape could be lowered to street level, but that would bring about a screech of metal that would attract everyone for thirty blocks. Instead, the climber hung from the lowest rung, and Jax moved forward to catch him and ease him to the ground. At least, that’s the way it should have gone in theory. In reality, the two went sprawling into a pile of garbage bags.

  “Nice catch,” Tommy growled.

  Jax grinned and hauled his friend upright. “Good thing garbage day isn’t till tomorrow.”

  “I already hate you, man, and this thing hasn’t even started yet. Do you know what happens to me if my old man snores himself awake and checks my room?”

  Jax was contrite. “Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten you involved.”

  “Oh, sure,” Tommy retorted. “Go out there and get yourself killed. It’s always about you.”

  “It might be about nothing,” Jax reminded him. “I didn’t even hear it. It’s more like I pulled it out of some guy’s mind. It could have been a daydream, and none of it’s real.”

  Tommy shrugged irritably. “I don’t know what to hope for. If it’s nothing, it isn’t worth all the hassle. And if it’s something, I’m definitely scared of it.”

  “We won’t know until we get there,” Jax pointed out. “Come on. You miss a train at this hour, you’ve got a long wait for the next one.”

  The two rode the subway to Forty-Second Street and walked to the corner of Forty-Fifth and Third. They ducked into the recessed doorway of a closed locksmith’s shop and surveyed the intersection. It was quieter here than it had been downtown. The multitudes who worked in this neighborhood rarely stuck around so late. Office buildings, banks, stores, restaurants — all closed except for a twenty-four-hour Japanese noodle shop, which had no customers at the moment.

  “Maybe your ESP radar picked up some guy’s takeout order,” Tommy whispered.

  “Shhhh!” Jax felt a rush of chagrin. Hypnotism was unscientific enough the way Dr. Mako practiced it — with an entire institute studying it like they were splitting the atom. For a newbie like Jax to run off half-cocked over every random burp of his brain was pretty flaky. And to get poor Tommy mixed up in it …

  “Incoming,” Tommy intoned.

  It was Wilson, approaching along Third Avenue. He wore black jeans and a black jacket, his collar upturned, the brim of his Yankees baseball cap pulled low. But nothing could disguise the arrogance in his posture.

  I wasn’t wrong, Jax thought to himself. Something was going down.

  They melted farther into the doorway as Wilson passed by. Tommy mouthed the words Big dude.

  Jax nodded. “Big ego, small brain,” he murmured back.

  Another black-clad figure crossed the street and joined Wilson. Jax recognized him instantly.

  “DeRon,” he whispered to Tommy. “Wilson’s sidekick. A little less muscle — everywhere except his head.”

  “Now can we go home?” Tommy asked hopefully.

  “Not till we find out what they’re up to.”

  Wilson and DeRon exchanged a few words and then headed west on Forty-Fifth. Jax watched them disappear, raising a hand to keep Tommy from running after them. They didn’t want to l
ose the two hypnos, but they couldn’t risk being spotted either. After a breathless thirty seconds, they scampered around the corner and took cover behind a mailbox.

  Wilson and DeRon were about a third of the way down the long block, at the door of a lit storefront. Apparently, the noodle shop wasn’t the only establishment in the neighborhood open at this hour.

  Jax and Tommy crossed to the other side and approached at a jog, keeping low in the shelter of parked cars. There stood Wilson, DeRon at his side, in what looked like conversation with a uniformed night watchman on the inside. After a moment, the guard slipped a latch and held the door wide open.

  “He knows them,” Tommy observed. “I thought they were going to break in or torch the place or something.”

  Jax shook his head. “He doesn’t know them. Wilson bent him. Right through the glass.”

  “Whoa.” Tommy was impressed. “Could you do that to get us into a Knicks game?”

  “Concentrate.” Jax watched as the two hypnos looked around the store. He couldn’t imagine what kind of business it might be. The lighting was dim, but bright enough to show that every inch of the floor was taken up with desks. Filing cabinets rose to the ceiling. The only empty wall space was plastered with posters. Jax squinted.

  “Schaumberg,” Tommy commented. “Isn’t that the guy from North Carolina running for president? What do a couple of teenage hypnotists care about him?”

  It came to Jax in a wave of revelation. “This guy’s running against Trey Douglas for the Democratic nomination! Trey Douglas is a major supporter of Sentia.”

  “Yeah, but what does this have to do with you?” Tommy wondered. “How can something that happens in a campaign office in the middle of the night mean that everybody can forget about you?”

  Wilson pulled two large canvas laundry bags out of a backpack. Jax and Tommy watched as the two hypnos began opening file drawers and dumping the contents into their sacks. While this was going on, the guard sat at his post, playing solitaire on a computer screen.