Cry Darkness

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘It’s not that easy …’ Connie’s voice tailed off.

  ‘What?’

  ‘… You’ll probably just think I’ve really gone mad,’ Connie continued. ‘I’m not even sure I should be talking on the phone.’

  Jones was in a big hurry now, and barely took in the meaning that might lie behind her words.

  ‘Spit it out, Connie, I really do have to go.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know quite where to begin …’

  There was another pause. Would she never get on with it?

  ‘Well, you know what it’s like here. We’re not exactly flavour of the month at RECAP.’

  ‘No. But that’s nothing new, is it?’

  RECAP – REsearch into Consciousness At Princeton, Connie Pike’s life’s work – was a project which had always hovered on the questionable fringes of established science.

  ‘Of course not,’ Connie agreed. ‘It’s just that, well, things have happened. You’re in a hurry. I won’t go into detail. But things have happened that have made Paul and I think that people in high places want to close us down altogether.’

  Jones wasn’t surprised. In fact it had always been something of a mystery to her that RECAP had survived as long as it had in its own wonderful crazy backwater at the famous Ivy League university.

  ‘I’d be very sorry about that,’ she responded truthfully enough.

  ‘Well, it’s a lengthy old story, and maybe I don’t really know what I’m talking about … but I just thought you might be able to help. You were always the one who could do what others couldn’t …’

  Her voice tailed off. Jones would indeed be deeply sorry to see the end of RECAP, but Connie Pike was taking her into territory she had no wish to re-enter. Nor was she keen on using whatever influence she might have to help save RECAP. The project wasn’t something that any ambitious academic would wish to be too closely associated with. And Sandy Jones had always been rather more ambitious than she liked to admit.

  ‘That was many years ago, Connie,’ she said.

  ‘Well I thought maybe you could do something … have a word …’

  ‘A word where, exactly?’

  ‘Well I don’t know, Sandy, but I was hoping you might.’

  ‘I can’t just go around sticking my nose into areas that no longer concern me, Connie, not even for you.’

  She mentally kicked herself. She hadn’t meant that to come out the way it did, but the damage was already done.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sandy,’ Connie responded at once, her voice unusually small. ‘I know you’re busy, this is obviously a bad moment.’

  Connie Pike was tough, but not always as tough as she talked. Jones knew she’d hurt her feelings, and she did adore the bloody woman after all.

  ‘Look, why don’t I call you back.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that, Sandy.’

  Connie sounded curiously formal. Quite unlike herself. Jones felt a small pang of guilt, sparked by a half-forgotten legacy of long ago.

  But all she said was: ‘OK. Fine. I really do have to go now, though. But I’ll call you, tomorrow at the latest.’

  ‘Thanks, Sandy.’

  Connie hung up at once. No banter. No more insults. Jones reflected that she hadn’t even said goodbye properly. There was something wrong, something definitely wrong. Damn. She’d call Connie back tomorrow, for sure. Just as soon as America was awake.

  TWO

  Four days later Jones was at her home just outside the little East Devon seaside town of Sidmouth. Northdown House had been built in the 1920s on a site chosen for its spectacular views over the Jurassic coast and out to sea.

  This was the place where she had brought up her twin sons, now twenty-year-old students, largely on her own. She was really on her own nowadays, except when either of the boys descended for a weekend, and the house was far too big for her. However, she loved it, had never quite been able to get over the fact that it was hers, and had as yet proved unable to make the intelligent decision to downsize.

  It was early evening. She was sitting at her kitchen table with a sandwich and a glass of wine, having just returned from a day in London at the BBC. Through the rest of the week her university duties had consumed virtually every waking moment. She remembered suddenly that she hadn’t returned Connie Pike’s call, and cursed her tardiness. She would do it straight away. As soon as she’d finished her sandwich.

  She’d switched on the TV as a matter of habit. It was tuned to Sky News, as usual. Jones was a news junkie. But the volume was low, and her mind was elsewhere. Suddenly though, something the newsreader was saying both alerted and alarmed her. It couldn’t be, could it? She turned up the volume.

  ‘… police are still unclear of the cause of the explosion at Princeton. It is hoped that the laboratory at the heart of the blast will provide enough forensic evidence to ascertain exactly what occurred. Early reports suggest that the university may have been targeted by an unknown terrorist group. New Jersey police refuse to confirm whether or not they suspect foul play, but the entire area is now a designated crime scene. The explosion occurred just after eight thirty this morning, and the two scientists known to be already working in the RECAP laboratory at the time of the explosion, Professor Paul Ruders, and project manager Constance Pike, are missing, presumed dead.’

  Jones felt a numbness spread through her body. She stared at the TV screen, willing it to tell her more, or best of all, tell her the item was just one big mistake.

  There was a roaring and a screaming inside her head. A part of her that she valued perhaps more than anything else, a part of her half-forgotten, totally neglected, and probably more important and more significant than anything else in her life, except her sons, had been suddenly ripped apart.

  Paul and Connie were dead. It couldn’t be true. And yet it was. She switched to CNN, which carried an almost identical report. She checked online, and quickly found the same item. Just a few paragraphs, so far. Those special people, their hopes and dreams, their work, their extraordinary special work, to all intents and purposes destroyed, and it only merited a few paragraphs.

  Jones felt a stab of pain in her heart.

  Connie’s phone call had been a cry for help. Jones had known that at the time, of course, which only made matters worse. There remained a bond between them, between all of them, really, who had been involved with RECAP during those heady pioneering days towards the end of the previous century.

  Connie had been trying to tell Sandy something, something that had been worrying her, something about the project. And Jones hadn’t even bothered to call back. Now it was too late. Connie was dead. Jones vowed that she would at least try to find out what it was that had clearly been so important to Connie Pike. She had to. For Connie. For Paul. For all of them.

  Her first call was to Thomas Jessop, the Dean of Princeton University. Thomas was the second in his family to achieve the elevated post. As a leading academic of international renown Jones was in touch with Jessop, as she was with a number of university chiefs worldwide. In addition she remembered Thomas as a post-graduate student at Princeton, when his late father Bernard had been dean. It had all seemed a little cosy to Jones when Thomas was appointed to the top job, but now she was rather glad of the link.

  She didn’t have his mobile number, so dialled his direct line at the university, which switched immediately to message service. She left a brief message but did not expect a reply, not in the near future at any rate, even though it was early afternoon in Princeton on a working day. She guessed that the entire university would have been cleared. After all, she’d already learned from the news bulletin that at least part of the campus was now a designated crime scene.

  She then tried the university switchboard number, just in case. It rang and rang. Again no surprise.

  Finally she sent Thomas Jessop an email, then went into the Princeton website in order to call up and print out the staff list which she knew included email addresses as well as, in most cases, dire
ct line phone numbers. She copied a message, asking for information about the blast, to everyone on the list.

  Not only were they all likely to recognize her name, but Americans, Jones knew, were inclined to be permanently logged in to their email and usually replied swiftly. Indeed she received two messages almost by return, but neither sender seemed able to add anything to what she had already learned on TV and online.

  She cursed herself for knowing so little about Connie and Paul’s personal lives. Everything to do with them had always seemed to revolve around RECAP. Indeed Jones had never been aware of Connie having any personal life at all. She had lived alone ever since Jones had first met her, as far as she knew. Paul, on the other hand, had been married for many years, and his wife, a frequent visitor to the lab during Jones’s days at Princeton, had been almost one of the team. But Jones knew that Gilda Ruders had died a couple of years previously after a short illness, and Connie’s recent remarks about Paul, during the brief phone conversation she had so thoughtlessly curtailed, appeared to indicate that he, too, had lived alone.

  In spite of that, bizarrely perhaps, she repeatedly called both Connie Pike and Paul Ruders’ home numbers.

  The sound of Connie’s voice on her answer service cut like a knife.

  ‘It’s Connie. Talk to me.’

  Talk to me. That is what she had wanted Jones to do four days earlier. If only Jones had done so.

  The first time she phoned she left a message.

  ‘Anyone who picks this up, will you please call me. I’m an old friend of Connie and Paul’s. I’m devastated by the terrible news and just want to find out exactly what happened at RECAP, and to see if there’s anything I can do to help.’

  As if, she thought to herself. She kept the TV on, channel-hopping the news stations. There was a succession of further reports. Jones learned that the cause of the blast remained uncertain. One report suggested that the explosion may have been accidental and caused by a gas leak. But terrorist action, unsurprisingly in the modern climate, remained the most frequently mentioned possibility.

  She also learned that there had been other casualties. A research scientist working in the biology laboratory on the floor above RECAP was believed to have been killed and two students injured, one seriously. Both CNN and Sky News explained that the list of casualties would have been much greater had the explosion not occurred early in the morning, before most staff and students had arrived in the building devoted to scientific research.

  Jones leaned back in her chair and struggled to think clearly. Was it likely that Princeton had been attacked by terrorists? And, if so, could RECAP really have been the target? It was well known that Connie and Paul were early starters, who treated their lab more like a second home than a workplace. Anyone wishing to destroy both them and virtually all trace of their project, without causing a significant number of other deaths, might well have chosen to arrange an early morning explosion. Indeed, it was quite probably bad luck that anyone else had been hurt at that hour, let alone killed. And Connie had certainly been ill at ease. Perhaps more than that. Had she been afraid? Jones wasn’t sure.

  Her mind was racing. She called Princeton police. On the umpteenth attempt she managed to get through to an officer who gave her the number of a helpline that had been set up for concerned relatives and friends. Again she had to redial the number several times before getting through. And, in spite of allegedly operating a help line, the young woman who eventually responded seemed unwilling at first to give any help at all.

  ‘I am afraid there’s a security clampdown on all information at the moment, ma’am, until we get a clearer picture of what has happened,’ she said.

  ‘Look, I’m Connie Pike’s cousin, from the Irish branch of the family,’ Jones lied. ‘The family over here are quite devastated, of course, and I’m just trying to find out exactly what happened.’

  The woman’s attitude to her changed very slightly.

  ‘I’m sorry for the situation you and your family find yourselves in, ma’am,’ she responded. ‘But I’m afraid there’s really very little more information we can give you than has already been released to the media. Over the phone anyway …’

  ‘Well, where are Connie and Paul? Presumably there is no doubt that they are dead. Have their bodies been removed from the scene yet?’

  As she spoke Jones realized what stupid questions those were. More than likely, Connie and Paul would have been blown to bits.

  She winced. That was not a prospect she wished to dwell on.

  There was a brief pause before the young woman spoke again.

  ‘Nothing at all has been removed from the scene yet,’ she eventually replied diplomatically. ‘The site of the explosion is still sealed off as part of the investigations by the various authorities involved. The entire campus has been evacuated and resident staff and students temporarily accommodated well away from the area, primarily at the Jadwin Gymnasium. There really is no more I can tell you, ma’am.’

  Jones’s head hurt. She had hunched herself so tensely over her phone and her computer that the muscles of her neck and shoulders seemed to have seized up.

  She needed to take a break. She made coffee, with which she washed down a couple of paracetamol, swallowing quickly before the heat of the liquid began to melt the pills.

  She glanced up at the clock on the kitchen wall. She couldn’t believe how the time had raced by. It was now almost one a.m. Eight o’clock the previous evening in New York and Princeton.

  She couldn’t rest, and she certainly couldn’t sleep. She had to do something. The weekend lay ahead, and Jones had few commitments over the early part of the subsequent week, apart from routine lectures which could be delayed.

  She logged onto the British Airways website and booked herself on the lunchtime flight from Heathrow to JFK. Her visit need only be a fleeting one, she told herself. She would return in good time for both her Oxford dinner and her next filming commitment the following weekend.

  In any case it was as if forces from another, until now, half-forgotten time were driving her to do it. As if she had no choice.

  She left home soon after seven in the morning, driving herself northwards along the M5 and then east on the M4 to the UK’s premier airport, where she’d booked valet parking.

  Her sporty Lexus SUV was a fine motor car, and it rarely failed to give her pleasure to drive it. But not on this occasion.

  She’d had far too little sleep, but she didn’t feel tired, just spaced out, as if she were not quite conscious of, or certainly not in total control of, what was happening. As if she had been somehow taken over by her own past.

  On the aircraft Jones found her thoughts drifting back to that special time in her life when she was at Princeton, and to her first meeting with the two extraordinary academics whose lives had been so brutally ended.

  She remembered her first visit to the RECAP laboratory as if it were yesterday. She could see it clearly in her mind’s eyes. And she doubted that the place had changed much until its terrible destruction.

  REsearch into Consciousness At Princeton. A wonderful, crazy, innovative venture which had never been more than tolerated by the powers that be. A scientific study of the power of the mind. The forgotten art, Connie had always called it. A series of laboratory-controlled experiments aimed at proving once and for all, in accordance with the accepted rules of mathematics and physics, whether or not the human mind really could exert control over matter. Whether the process of thought, conscious or even unconscious, could control the performance of machines.

  And beyond that, of course, an examination of mankind’s greatest secret, the meaning of consciousness.

  It had begun in the 1970s, when a small group of trailblazers had launched themselves on what they had believed to be the ultimate scientific journey: an ongoing exploration of the human mind, conducted under strict laboratory conditions, and hopefully leading towards not only a fuller knowledge of the mind’s powers but also, maybe one day
, to at least some level of understanding of the final mystery. What is consciousness? And what, if we surrender to it, is consciousness capable of?

  It had always been something of a dream. But Sandy Jones, the girl from the wrong side of town, also knew that dreams could come true. And, rather to her surprise, she had become enthralled by RECAP, and those who had made it their life’s work.

  PART TWO

  The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.

  Albert Einstein

  THREE

  Jones had not even heard of RECAP when she arrived at Princeton in 1994. But her, at first reluctant, association with the charismatic underworld of the project and its people began by accident just a few weeks later.

  Princeton itself had been a culture shock. And Jones was still getting used to the air of unreality about the place, from its perfectly manicured lawns and immaculately sited sculptures to its curiously out of place architecture.

  Mock Tudor mansions dominated the campus, most serving as dining halls for students. To Jones, accustomed as she had quickly become to the famous dreamy spires of Oxford, arguably the grandest old university in existence, it all looked totally false. The buildings didn’t really belong. Jones thought they were like a cross between the more pretentious examples of English suburbia and the set of Stepford Wives. Everything about the place created an atmosphere of some kind of alternative world. Students and staff wafted about in a bubble of their own superiority, a state not uncommon in great universities internationally. But at Princeton this seemed to be taken to extremes, without a hint, of course, of what Jones considered to be the saving grace of good old British cynicism and self-deprecation. Princeton and its people, she learned, took themselves and their reproduction architecture very seriously indeed.