by Ilsa J. Bick
“Pahl,” Kaldarren said, his heart sinking. “Pahl, where ... ?”
“Dad!” Jase’s voice, on the edge of hysteria, and then in the next instant, Jase had darted from a far corner and launched himself into Kaldarren’s arms. “Dad, Dad!”
“Jase.” Kaldarren’s throat constricted with emotion as he hugged his son tight against his chest. Then he gripped his son by his shoulders. “Jase, what’s wrong with Pahl?”
“They’re here,” whispered Jase. His lips trembled, and Kaldarren saw that the boy’s skin was so pale it was almost translucent. “They’re here, Dad, they’re here, don’t you see them? They’re all around, and now they’ve got Pahl. Only It’s not Pahl, It only looks like Pahl, but It’s not Pahl.”
“How?”
“He ... Pahl picked up this mask. He picked it up and he put it on. I couldn’t stop him! And then they were everywhere, coming out the walls, can’t you see them, can’t you ...”
“Jase.” Kaldarren’s fingers dug into Jase’s shoulders, and he held his son at arm’s length. He would’ve touched the boy’s mind, but he was still wary of dropping his guard. Can’t let them in all at once, or I’m lost. I need to be the one to control the contact, not the other way around. Instead, Kaldarren searched the boy’s face and saw his terror. “Who are they?”
And then Kaldarren felt a stab of fear. “Did they ... ?”
“No, they didn’t hurt me. They didn’t get inside. They tried. But I’m not right, I can’t ... I don’t think they can get inside me. I don’t understand it all, only I know they took Pahl and they wanted to take me, but they can’t. But, Dad, they’re here,” Jase looked behind Kaldarren, eyes darting from side to side, “they’re all around. Can’t you see them? Can’t you see?”
No, he couldn’t see. Kaldarren kept his mind closed. He wouldn’t let them in, not yet. But the air was thick and he felt those icy fingers again, tapping at the opaqueness of his mind, like leafless branches tapping at windowpanes on a winter’s day.
But his tricorder saw them. Kaldarren scanned the data. Highly cohesive fields of psionic energy held together the way that high-energy particles were contained in a magnetic field. Energy that had form but was not matter: there, and not there, as if they—whoever they were—trembled on the threshold between dimensions. Had they been there all along? If so, why hadn’t he sensed them? They flitted about the periphery of his mind now. Why not earlier? All the hours he’d spent searching in vain for beings that now his tricorder registered as a matter of routine.
Or maybe it was something the boys had done. That mask, for instance. Kaldarren studied Pahl’s face, the mask. An image flashed in his brain: that small, chipped stone figure he’d found a few days ago. It had a mask. Come to think of it, the mask Pahl wore was very similar to ones he’d heard about but never seen. An obscure Cardassian religion, one that the government didn’t endorse but which survived in small pockets here and there. What was it? Kaldarren searched his memory. Yes, the Oralian Way, that was it. If he remembered rightly, certain Oralians used what they called a recitation mask as part of their religious ritual. They claimed that the mask was a conduit, connecting them to a higher spiritual power. The Oralians who wore the mask did not claim that they spoke the words of a god. Rather, the mask served to augment powers they already had.
And now Pahl wore a mask, and Kaldarren knew, unequivocally, that the boy had somehow opened the door through which a being that was pure thought had managed to slip, invading the boy’s mind. What if this was the original mask upon which the Oralian recitation mask was based? The mask could be a device attuned to the psionic signature of a certain select few.
Kaldarren looked down at his son. “I can’t see them, Jase. I can’t ... let myself just yet. No time to explain, Jase. But tell me: What do they look like?”
“Animals.” Jase licked his lips. “Like from those old stories you showed me. Egypt, Greece, early Betazoid mythology.”
“Like the statues in the other room?” said Kaldarren. “The murals?”
“Yes, but there are also people, and they look like ...” Jase’s eyes slid to a spot behind Kaldarren.
Turning, Kaldarren spied the corpse of the boy. He studied the dead boy’s facial features. Even with decay and mummification, Kaldarren could see that the boy had raised periorbital ridges. Pre-Cardassian?
“Dad,” said Jase, “you have to help Pahl.”
“I don’t think I can, son.”
“But we can’t leave him here. How do you know? You haven’t even tried!”
Kaldarren licked his lips. “Jase, I’m a telepath, but there are limits. I couldn’t find this place, remember? You and Pahl did. Whoever’s there, in Pahl, allowed the two of you in, not me.”
“But you’re here now. They’re here. They let you come, and you found me because I knew you would, because I need you. Dad, you have to try!”
“Son, there’s nothing ...” He stopped when he saw Jase’s face change. “Son ...”
“You’re afraid,” said Jase. His voice was hard-edged, bitter. “That’s what it is. You’re afraid to try. Mom would be afraid, but she’d try.”
Kaldarren felt a lump swell and lodge in his throat. He was afraid. Maybe that’s why he’d not been able to find the portal (is this a portal?) and why he couldn’t see what his son said was there. He was afraid, as he’d always been afraid. Rachel had been the stronger one. That’s why he’d been attracted to her. The only risk Kaldarren had ever taken in his entire life was to marry Rachel Garrett. In the end, he’d let her walk out of his life; he’d lost her without a fight.
And he didn’t have to fight now. He could walk away, with Jase, and he didn’t think these beings would stop him. They had Pahl, and perhaps that was enough. Besides, Pahl wasn’t his responsibility.
But Kaldarren also knew that if he did that, if he succumbed to fear, he’d lose Jase the way he’d lost Rachel. Oh, Jase would still be alive, but his soul would be closed off to Kaldarren forever and Kaldarren would lose his son just as surely as if Jase’s mind had been taken over by one of these beings.
“All right,” said Kaldarren, even as his instinct for self-preservation screamed that this was anything but all right. “I’ll try.”
Jase’s face was pinched with apprehension. His eyes were wide, dark. He gave his father a slight nod. Took a tiny step back.
Kaldarren turned to Pahl. The boy hadn’t moved or spoken. With exquisite care, Kaldarren opened his mind, just a bit: like cracking a window to let in a whisper of fresh air. He probed the boy’s mind, first touching the surface the way a blind person traces the contours of a stranger’s face. Instantly, Kaldarren felt the presence of the Other. Formless and cold. Dark, as if it dwelled in the deep caverns of the mind.
Kaldarren flinched away even before he knew he had, and then he was orbiting the periphery of the boy’s mind, his own mind safe and unscathed. In the next instant, hot shame flowed through his veins. Stop, don’t let fear control you! He was acutely aware of his son’s intense gaze; of the closeness of the air, thick with these beings; of the stink of his own sweat.
I must. Kaldarren gathered himself. I must. He loosed part of his mental shield, as if shedding a piece of clothing, and then he waded into the black ocean of Pahl’s mind ... and there was the Other, in the shallows—a woman, not a woman, and thoughts that twined and writhed like a serpent’s tail.
Jase caught at his hand. “Dad?” He squeezed Kaldarren’s chill fingers. “Dad?”
“Quiet, son,” said Kaldarren, his voice strange, halting. “I have to concentrate, I have to ...” He broke off, redirected his focus toward the Other. Who are you?
Dithparu. The word floated, tenuous as the silver strand of a spider’s web. Dithparu.
Night Spirit, Kaldarren translated. Kaldarren always found it easier to imagine his own thoughts as a voice and he thought his voice now. “Do you have a name?”
“Uramtali”—her thought-voice, like a sigh on the wind—“They c
alled me Uramtali.”
“What do you want, Uramtali? Why do you hold this boy?”
The dithparu, like the dry rasp of leaves upon dead branches: “He has a hole in his heart. There is Night in his soul. The other, he is Night but not enough.”
Night. Kaldarren’s mind held the word, examined it. Uramtali said Night, but she—It—meant something different. What?
Uramtali was speaking again. “This one is a boy of Night, like the Night Kings before him. Bred to the purpose.”
Kaldarren didn’t understand. He closed his eyes. He knew vaguely that Jase still held his hand, but Kaldarren’s mind was further from shore now, and he drifted, opening more of the shielded, secret places of his mind. Think it to me.
Instantly, a blizzard of strange images streamed through his consciousness. There were so many, Kaldarren couldn’t put names to any of them and he merely held his mind open, letting the images impress themselves into his brain like red-hot brands upon exposed flesh. The aroma of incense was full in his nostrils; he heard the voices of a people crying out their grief; he saw a glittering processional of mourners, light globes floating in the air above their heads, as they snaked their way through mountain passes—
Uramtali’s thought-voice in his head: the light globes floating in the air above their heads, as they snaked their way through mountain passes to this place, these mountains with their strange magnetic fields, trapping us here.
Then he understood. The dithparus: fantastically old, the remnants of a powerful civilization predating the Vulcans, the Bajorans, even the Organians and the Metrons, and so ancient that they no longer remembered where they had come from, what their true names were, what their own bodies had once looked like, or that they’d even had bodies. They knew only that they were the dithparus, the name given to them by the people on this planet, who worshiped them as gods.
In exile—Uramtali’s thought-voice, so sad—in exile.
Exiled to a parallel dimensional plane. Trapped.
Imprisoned. Brothers, they were our brothers, but they said that we were evil, darkness, the night side of their own souls.
The Brothers of Light: beings that thought it crueler to kill the Night Spirits than to place them here, unable to cross over, to make the transition from one phase to another, unless there was a suitable container. A waiting vessel.
And willing—Uramtali pushed that thought home—we are not all-powerful, the vessel must welcome us, must want our minds.
And so the tradition had built up among the people of this planet: the Night Kings.
The Night Kings, bred for the purpose.
For something very much like a phase change—Kaldarren’s own thoughts went, of their own volition, to a physical analogy—like the phase change that occurs when water goes to steam, or ice. Whatever the form, it’s still water. But the conditions for the transition, whether of water to ice, or a dithparu to a form capable of inhabiting a living being, had to be ideal, or else the phase change wouldn’t occur. The container—no, thought Kaldarren, not the container, the mind—had to be flexible enough to accommodate and adapt to the dithparu’s psionic patterns.
Maybe that’s why the dithparu was able to use Pahl. The boy was young, his powers still raw and his control not as finely tuned as Kaldarren’s. His mind was malleable; he didn’t have the ability to shield himself the way Kaldarren did. Kaldarren doubted the boy even knew he was a telepath.
Kaldarren knew now that there was no portal, not in the way Chen-Mai or Kaldarren had imagined. The place was more like an incubator.
A prison, they hold us here, but they are gone, long ago, and we are forgotten.
A storage container: the magnetic field designed to keep these dithparus trapped here until they could exchange places with a telepath bred to the purpose, like being granted a parole by an unseen jailer. This explained the elaborate rituals, the texts on the walls that spoke of exchanging the king’s spirit for another, because the Night Kings had been bred, perhaps even genetically modified, to serve as the containers in which a dithparu could live for a span of time outside this place, this prison.
Tend the machines. But we have no knowledge, no science; we can be nothing more than we have been.
Yes, Kaldarren understood it now. When the Night King died, his body was laid to rest in these mountains, and his heir was brought here to serve as a container for another dithparu. It was, Kaldarren thought, a primitive yet effective way of keeping the dithparus in check, letting one out at a time. That one dithparu lived out a mortal span, tending to the machines it knew how to access (that power source, probably the last of many), but never expanding further than the accumulated sum of the knowledge of the dithparus that had come before. They didn’t even know how to set themselves free.
And then something had gone wrong. (Kaldarren felt the dithparus clamoring in his mind: Yes, yes, yes!) Either the line of kings had died out, or there had been war, or some calamity.
All three. They broke the cycle, one named Nartal, a prince, a coward.
Prince Nartal, who left before the transfer could take place, and so a dithparu had taken what it could find: the boy, Ishep, now dead at his feet. But Ishep didn’t know how to get out of the tomb. Only Nartal had, and the dithparu’s powers were limited. So they had been trapped here for thousands of years, waiting for someone to find and free them while, above, the planet had died because Nartal did not know how to tend the machines, or even that they required this.
The mask, use the mask.
The mask was an amplifier, channeling the flow of psychic energy into the new host. And that was why they needed Pahl.
Still, to Kaldarren, it made no sense. Yes, they might lure Pahl here and inhabit his body, as Uramtali did now. But that being done, why keep Jase? Jase was no telepath. True, he called out; Kaldarren caught that mind-scream and followed it here, but was that Jase? Or had the dithparus, had Uramtali amplified Jase’s cry?
Kaldarren felt weak and dizzy. He was aware now that he was trembling from the effort, his mind reeling from the images that pummeled his mind. Why keep Jase? No, no—Kaldarren’s mind labored over the question—that was wrong, he was asking the wrong question. This wasn’t just about keeping Jase; that mind-scream had been Jase calling for him, but Jase shouldn’t have been able to do that, not without help.
Help us, please help us.
Such an innocent request: Help us, please. Kaldarren very nearly responded, but something—that instinct for self-preservation again—stopped the thought, cold. Something about what the dithparu had thought at him niggled at his brain, and Kaldarren thought back now over what the Night Spirit had said.
Willing. Yes, that was it. The container, the new host, had to be willing, had to want the dithparu to slip inside and take over.
Kaldarren felt cold beads of perspiration speckling his brow. This wasn’t about keeping Jase, or even Pahl. This wasn’t about Jase at all. It was about finding ...
You.
“But why?” Kaldarren cried, out loud now, his voice ripping the air. “Why?”
“Dad?” Frightened, Jase jerked at Kaldarren’s hand. His father’s eyes bulged, unseeing. “Dad, what is it?”
“Why did you need to find me?” Kaldarren’s anguished cry banged off stone. “Why have you hidden yourselves until now?”
No. The word shivered through his mind. You have hidden yourself from us.
Of course, Kaldarren thought, that was right. They’d sensed Pahl in orbit and tried to reach him through a dream, and then when Pahl had been most vulnerable, flinging his tortured thoughts so widely that Kaldarren had detected them for the first time, they’d sensed him. But the contact had been so brutal—the pain, I remember that searing pain—that his mental shields had snapped into place, and he’d automatically shut them out, a response so reflexive he wasn’t aware he’d done it. After that, he hadn’t been able to find them; with his shields in place, they couldn’t touch him. How ironic: He’d thought at that retreating c
ontact not to be afraid, and yet he was the one who’d felt fear. Wanting without wanting. Searching for the portal, but with his mind veiled, protected.
It was, he considered, the way he’d lived his life: the same way he’d kept himself hidden from Rachel; the hurt they’d caused one another making him withdraw, close off to so many things. The dithparus must have sensed him long ago, but Kaldarren was—strong, you are strong—stronger than he imagined, or had wanted to believe, and so his mind had been hidden—afraid of us, of yourself, of her—resistant to their pleas. Not open to us, or to her, dwelling on your hurt.
So they’d done the next best thing. They’d fixed upon Jase and especially upon Pahl, who was young, untrained. Defenseless.
Cold fury blossomed in Kaldarren’s chest. They’d used Pahl, and then they’d used Jase, as bait. They’d tried to take his son, his son! And even if they had Kaldarren, would they stop? Could they be stopped? Or could he hold them, in place, inside where they couldn’t get at Jase, or anyone? Because he was strong: stronger than he’d imagined, or dared to believe.
For you, my son, Kaldarren thought. I would do this for you. For us all.
The twin poles of anger—grief and resolve—blazed in his heart. He turned away from Pahl’s face, expressionless beneath its silver mask, and his voice boomed through the chamber.
“Well, I’m here now!” he roared. Kaldarren struck his chest with his clenched fist. “My mind is open now, and I’m here, I’m here, you have what you want, so let them go and take me, take me!”
“Dad!” Jase shouted. “Dad, no!”
Open your mind.
“All right, come on, I’m waiting!” And then, just before he dropped the last of his defenses, he thought at Jase: Son, when it happens, run, run!
Jase gasped. “Dad, no, I won’t, no!”
Jase, you must! Then, without waiting for his son’s reply, Kaldarren unveiled his mind. “Do it,” he cried, “do it!”
