Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1)

by Julie Drew

  “I know this is crazy,” she said. “It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

  “Actually, it sounds like an incredible experience,” Finn said.

  “No, it sounds crazy,” she corrected him. “I’ve only told Keisha what happened that night, and never all of it, even to her. I mean, how could I know perfectly well that I had a concussion—which definitely messes with your head—and simultaneously believe that what I thought and felt were real?”

  “Not everything can be neatly explained,” Finn said. He reached up and absently caught one long tendril of her hair that had been caught by the breeze and blown toward him. He held onto it, tethered her to him.

  Breathe, Tesla reminded herself. She wondered why he had such an effect on her, and then Finn released her hair, their connection broken.

  “What happened then?” he asked.

  Tesla closed her eyes. Remembered. She had peeled back her covers and sat up, slowly, looked toward the half-closed door of her hospital room where the bright light of the hallway sliced into the darkness. The light had looked strange, diffused. “I put on my favorite robe—”

  “I thought you came in an ambulance straight from school. You had your favorite robe?” Finn asked, and Tesla saw that he was, indeed, a journalist.

  Unexpectedly, she grinned. “Keisha brought it to me from my house the second she got out of school. She said some perv designed hospital gowns so that sick and doped-up people, who maybe wouldn’t notice, would have horrifying wardrobe malfunctions all over the hospital for the amusement of the interns.”

  “That’s Keisha, alright,” Finn said, his affection for his cousin apparent in his voice.

  “Anyway, I wanted to get out of that room, but I didn’t want to get caught. I was supposed to stay in bed.” When Tesla’s feet had touched the icy, polished floor that night, the cool, solid texture against the soles of her bare feet braced her. It had felt marvelous just to be upright again. She took hold of the pole with the heart monitor and made her way to the door.

  “I peered around the doorjamb and saw that the nurses’ station was pretty far down the hall to the right,” she said, “but just a few feet from my room on the other side was the elevator and, across from that, the door to the stairwell. I didn’t see a soul, except for the bent head of someone who sat at the nurse’s station.” Tesla felt again the excitement of that moment, the thrill of escape. The beep of her heart monitor had been so soft she had felt certain no one would hear it.

  “I made my way toward the elevator, but just before I pressed the Down button I realized that when the elevator arrived it would ping, and the nurse at the station would probably look up. So I decided to take the stairs.”

  “Pretty impressive presence of mind with a concussion,” Finn commented.

  “I know, right?” said Tesla, clearly proud of her Jason Bourne moment, despite the fact that she had already characterized the escapade as stupid.

  “I got the door open and closed again behind me,” she continued. “Then it was just me and my machine in the stairwell. That soft beep echoed around in the narrow space, and down I went. I was a little confused by how much of the building seemed to be underground. I mean, there are usually only one or two basement levels, right? But I walked down two hundred and eighty steps with my monitor before I started messing up the count. And by then my feet were really cold and I had to hold onto the railing. I was tired. I lost track of time, which is unusual for me.” Unaware that her voice had changed tone, that she sounded anxious, even afraid, Tesla didn’t notice Finn’s intense look, she just stared at her hands in her lap.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Tesla shrugged. “And then I was just at the bottom. There was a heavy, windowless metal door, wide open like I was supposed to go in, one of those key pad security system panels on the wall right next to it, and no one in sight.”

  They both heard the breathlessness in her voice, and Finn waited, expectantly.

  “I paused for a sec, and then I walked right through the door.”

  “Nice,” he said, approval and admiration clear in his voice. “What was on the other side of the door?”

  “That’s when it all gets a little fuzzy. I stood for a minute and looked back up the stairs, confused. I couldn’t really remember why I had come down there. I was just inside the open door and at the beginning of a hallway that couldn’t have been there, because my hospital room was the last one on my floor in the corner of the building, and the stairwell was right next to my room.”

  “How could you be sure? Remember, you had a concussion,” Finn pressed her for details, pushed her to remember, to think it through.

  “I know. But I’ve been over it and over it, and concussion or not, I know where I was. I have a, um, highly developed sense of direction and spatial relationships,” she added self-consciously.

  “Spatial relationships?” he repeated, amused by her again. “Who says that? I’m not even sure I know what it means.”

  “You do, too,” she said impatiently. “And it’s not that hard to figure out if you don’t.”

  “Explain it to me, this gift of yours,” he said.

  “I never said it was a gift,” she said quickly.

  “Still. Give me an example.”

  “Well, like with basketball,” she said reluctantly, thankful that the gloom concealed her. “I’m no athlete—not like Keisha—but I—”

  “But you what?” he encouraged when she hesitated.

  “I just seem to know, instinctively I guess, where I am in relation to whatever is around me.” There, she thought. I said it.

  “How do you mean?” he asked.

  “I never miss a shot,” she said softly.

  “Ever?”

  “Ever.” She looked at her hands in her lap. She downplayed this stuff with Keisha and Max, scoffed and denied when they couldn’t help but comment on what they saw her do, consistently, over time. She was not a freak. And she had never—not even once—tried to tell anyone about this stuff. She had refused to try out for the team, despite Keisha’s harangues their freshman year. She wasn’t sure why she had decided to spill it to Finn, whom she didn’t even know, but somehow it had just become part of the story that she was, for good or ill, telling him now.

  “I can miss, of course,” she said quickly. “But not if I really try. And I don’t mean easy stuff—I’m talking hard shots. Impossible angles. Of course, if I’m too far away, if I don’t have the upper body strength to actually get the ball to the hoop, I can’t do it. Like I said, I’m not really an athlete. But my aim—my perspective and my depth perception and my calculations of distance, speed, arc—well, they’re good, and they’re sort of, um, instantaneous. I don’t have to think about it, I just know.”

  Finn sat back and considered her for a moment. “Well, that’s pretty cool,” he said. “We’ll have to play sometime.”

  Tesla smiled, a bit tentatively, but it was clear that she appreciated that he hadn’t made a big deal out of it. “So where was I?”

  “I think you were under the hospital. The corridor continued on even though you knew you were at the end of the building.”

  “Right. So after twenty feet or so the hallway should have ended and turned 90 degrees, because it had hit the exterior wall—you know, the end of the hospital building itself—just like every other floor on the South side.” She paused and frowned. “So, clearly my story has no credibility, because it’s impossible that that hallway continued.”

  “How do you know?” Finn asked.

  “Because right next to the hospital is a huge green space, the university’s quad, which is empty. There are no structures there. And then, across the quad, a good two hundred yards away, is the physics building—I’ve been there a thousand times. My dad’s classroom lab is there, his office, too, and I could navigate it, the hospital, the library, and student union with my eyes closed. I grew up here,” she answered with absolute certainty.

  “You’re the one who
said it couldn’t have happened, not me,” Finn pointed out.

  Tesla cocked her head slightly to the side, considering this, and then nodded. “My concussion must have been worse than the doctors let on. It’s the only explanation.”

  The darkness hid Finn’s face from her, but she sensed his excitement, the breath he kept in check. She viewed her story as similar to the stories of dreams you have that, while perhaps exciting for you because you experienced it, not so much for the listener, who knows from the start that it was all a figment of your imagination. She was surprised that Finn was so caught up in it.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “I looked at that long, empty hallway that could not possibly be there,” Tesla continued. “I knew I should go back to my room. I didn’t know where I was. My head hurt. I was clearly in some kind of restricted area.”

  “So you went back to your room?”

  “No. I began to walk down the hall.”

  “I see what you mean about not following directions,’” Finn said dryly.

  Tesla ignored him. “It was a while before I realized that the sounds of the hospital were gone; there were no vibrations, no sense at all of the pervasive energy field I’d imagined myself a part of. There was only the sound of my heartbeat from the monitor, which glided along silently on the concrete floor. I passed no doors, no signage of any kind. The gash in my forehead throbbed, and then I came to the end of the hallway. On my left was a single, unmarked door with a simple lever-handle. I pushed it down, the door clicked, and swung inward without a sound. I walked through, wheeled my machine with me, and the door closed behind us.”

  “And?” Finn encouraged when she paused.

  “And I stood there, shocked. I was in a huge, airplane-hanger size room, with scaffolding and lights above that were mostly off. Just like the hospital it seemed to be shut down for the night, though there was a small glow that came from the far right corner of the enormous space.”

  Tesla stopped then, unsure how to continue with the story, or even if she should. She remembered how she had walked toward the light and realized only when she was very close that it came from another structure within the massive cave, a low ceilinged room within the larger, cavernous space. The light came from a doorway, and she hadn’t hesitated at all, but had walked right through it. Her way had been blocked by a huge piece of glass, semi-transparent, and turned at an angle. She walked around it, and when she did she saw herself reflected in the weak, see-through mirror. She stood for a moment and looked at that girl. Her face was alarmingly pale where it wasn’t bruised and swollen, and there was a huge bandage on her forehead. Her hair was a tangled mass of flame that curled and moved around her head and shoulders with a life of its own. She lifted her hand automatically to smooth it down, but when she saw how badly that girl’s hand shook she snatched it back.

  She had turned away from herself and looked at the empty room, a square space about the size of her bedroom at home, but with huge, reflective mirrors angled toward the center at each corner. She walked into the middle, slowly turned around and took in the bare, smooth walls, the low ceiling, the inexplicable, but somehow purposeful mirrors while her heart beeped quietly by her side.

  And then, from nowhere and everywhere she had heard the amplified sound of her father’s voice as it echoed in the strange chamber.

  “In five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

  The light of a thousand, thousand suns hit her face and blazed through her head and she was blinded in a pure white nova, the monitor’s dutiful amplification of her accelerating heartbeat the only sense of her physical self that remained to her, until the pain in her chest hit her like a truck and she fell, once again, into darkness.

  “So, what was in the smaller room?” Finn asked, and Tesla was pulled back into the present.

  “Nothing, really,” she said quickly, suddenly wary. She dreamed of that night sometimes, and always woke in a clammy sweat. Whatever had happened—or whatever she imagined had happened—continued to make her afraid, all these months later.

  “You can’t just stop there, Tesla,” he said casually, but his voice was too intense, he was too interested in what was supposedly a chance conversation and she knew he had manipulated her into telling her story, this story, though for what purpose she could not imagine.

  “Look, I need to get home, it must be late—” she said as she reached into the side pocket of her messenger bag for her cell and realized that it wasn’t there. “Great. I left my cell at Angelo’s. I gotta go.” She was already on her feet and had begun to jog back the way they’d come.

  At Angelo’s she pushed the glass door of the pizzeria open and made her way toward the table she’d occupied with Malcolm, though she held out little hope her phone would still be there. The crowd was a lot worse at this hour, and the noise of conversations and the TV that blared from its mount on the wall were hardly conducive to ambient dining. She gently pushed between two people to get a clear view of the table and saw, to her astonishment, her cell phone right in the middle of the table, between and among the plates and glasses and red pepper shakers that cluttered its surface.

  “Hey, I left my phone here,” she said loudly to the four students who sat there eating, and one of the guys indicated without a word that she should take it. “Thanks,” she said, grabbed it and turned to go.

  “Tesla,” Finn said, suddenly by her side in the crowd, but before he could say more there was a shout.

  “Turn it up—shut up everybody, check it out!”

  The girl at the register had picked up the remote and turned up the volume on the TV, and every head in the place turned to face the screen. The ticker tape feed at the bottom read, “Breaking News: explosion on university campus,” and the live video showed smoke and fire billowing out of a large, cream-colored building, a dozen fire trucks and ambulances parked nearby. Red lights flashed, reporters stood with mics in the glare of studio lights positioned by their crews, and dozens of people watched from behind yellow tape barricades.

  “Tesla,” Finn said again, his voice loud and his hand on her arm. “We need to talk.”

  “I can’t!” she said, and the panic in her voice was unmistakable as she shook his hand off her.

  He tried to follow, overcome by frustration, as she pushed her way through the bodies. Tesla was desperate, panicked. “Move!” she shouted repeatedly as she slipped further away from him and burst out of the door of Angelo’s.

  Finn shoved someone into a chair by the door in order to catch her before she got away. “Tesla, stop! What the hell?” He was outside, finally, and he grabbed her arm again, tried to fix her to this moment, to him.

  She pushed him away from her, harder than he would have thought she was capable, and he staggered back a step. “That explosion—it was the physics building,” she yelled. “I need to make sure my dad’s at home!”

  Tesla turned before he could say a word and sprinted toward her house as fast as she had ever, in her seventeen years, moved.

  CHAPTER 7

  Tesla rounded the corner by the tall hedge of the next-door neighbor’s house and was suddenly yanked back on her heels by Finn, who had caught up to her.

  She turned on him, her eyes narrowed to furious slits. “Get the hell off me, Finn!”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” he hissed. He pulled her back into the thick, solid wall of greenery. “Slow down. Tell me what’s going on, I can help.” He was winded—she had said she was no athlete, but the girl was fast.

  She squirmed and twisted, tried to break free from the tight grip he had on her, but his hand around her bicep would not yield. “Let me go!” she whispered fiercely, her voice low, but she stopped struggling. Finn’s hushed voice, his attempt to hide them both in the dark shadows of the hedge, had begun to affect her own behavior. She leaned toward him and whispered, “I need to find my dad—”

  “Shhh,” he suddenly cautioned, his mouth by her ear, as he pulled her deeper into the greenery and pointed at
her house. “Look.” He felt her labored breath, the adrenaline-fueled tremors that shook her body. They melted into the hedge, safely hidden in the shadows that were even darker than the night that had descended fully since they’d left Angelo’s. A lifetime ago, Finn thought as he slowly, carefully leaned his head out from the hedge. Tesla immediately followed suit, just enough to get a glimpse of the front of the house.

  They stood still and peered through the dark, barely breathing. There was no movement, no noise at all on the quiet residential street. But just as Tesla opened her mouth to tell Finn she didn’t see anything, they both stiffened and stared, mesmerized by the ghostly vision they could just make out through the gently blown, sheer curtains of the open living room windows.

  A light moved along the interior walls of the house and made its way up the staircase to the second floor.

  “Shit!” Finn said quietly to himself as Tesla darted out from behind him. She stuck close to the dense leaves and branches that formed a wall on her right as she began to walk quickly toward the backyard of her house.

  He caught up with her under the big maple half a dozen yards from the back of the house where Tesla had paused in the shadow of its thick, gnarled trunk. He stood just behind her, put a hand on her shoulder and leaned down. “What, exactly, are you doing?”

  “I need a better vantage point,” she whispered back.

  “There’s somebody in your house, Tesla, and I don’t think it’s a member of your family. You can’t go in there. C’mon, let’s go. Leave it to the professionals.”

  “Good. You call the police. The physics building—where my dad works—blew up tonight and now somebody’s in my house.” She stared him down, her eyes disconcertingly clear, blue and green even in the darkness. And then she walked swiftly toward the backdoor.

  I didn’t mean the police, he thought, as he hurried after her and cursed himself for not realizing before just how reckless she was.