The Reach

by Nate Kenyon

“I don’t want to!”

  “Then you’ll miss it. Can you smell the air? It’s cool out here. There’s grass and some trees in the yard. There’s a squirrel by the fence, he’s standing up and holding something in his paws. He’s chattering at us. Can you hear him, Sarah?”

  Slowly, her eyes still squeezed tightly shut, Sarah nodded. Then she opened her eyes to the sun and struggled to her feet. Spreading her arms wide, she stood there for a moment, then stepped away into the grass and stumbled to her knees.

  Jess felt a curious chill creep over her that had nothing to do with the wind. Sarah’s face had suddenly gone absolutely smooth and a smile touched her lips as she knelt in the grass.

  She bent and grabbed two handfuls and pulled, digging her fingers into the dirt. She rolled on her back and wriggled herself into the earth.

  A strange sound the girl made. It took Jess several moments to realize Sarah was crying and laughing at the same time.

  The sun slipped behind a cloud. Jess sat on the steps and watched as Sarah sat up and swayed like a snake, eyes closed, cheeks streaked with dirt and tears. “I don’t feel too good,” she said in a slurred voice.

  “They gave you a drug. It’s supposed to calm you down. It will make your mouth feel a little dry and your head kind of full. You’re going to feel calmer and you might get sleepy.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “What happened in there, Sarah?”

  She opened her eyes. “Nothing!”

  “You mean you don’t know, or you don’t want to tell me?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I don’t believe you did anything on purpose. You were scared.”

  “You weren’t there. In the Room. I needed you!”

  “If I’d known they were going to bring you to the playroom today, I would have come sooner.”

  “I looked for you out the window.”

  “Did you break the glass, Sarah?”

  “I don’t know! I just wanted to get out!”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I tried to talk to that boy, to help him. But he wouldn’t listen. He started screaming, and he tried to take Connor. Then they came to take me away. You don’t know what they do! They grab you hard and they give you shots and tie you up. They take you to the bad place. I didn’t want them to do that anymore. So I pushed them. I…pushed.” Sarah smiled and closed her eyes again, drifting. “I pushed…”

  “You fought them.”

  “That’s when the glass broke. They made me do it.”

  “You didn’t mean to.”

  “I’m stronger now. I’ve been practicing. Do you want to see?”

  “No, Sarah. I don’t want any more fighting. No matter how bad things get, violence is not the answer.”

  Sarah opened her eyes again. “You don’t know anything. I’m not going to let them tie me up. If they try it again I’m going to make them dead.”

  “Sarah, I know you’re angry. You have every right to be. But they’re adults, and they’re bigger than you. No matter how hard you fight them they’re going to win.”

  Jess saw the man in the guardhouse down the driveway watching them. He raised something to his mouth and spoke into it. Then he stuck it back into his belt and started walking up the driveway.

  The gates were shut and the fence ran unbroken around the perimeter of the building. There was no reason they couldn’t be out here. Still, for some reason she felt threatened.

  The temperature had dropped noticeably. Jess noticed Sarah following her gaze to the guardhouse and the man walking up the drive. She hugged her arms to her chest and rubbed her fingers. “We should go inside now,” she said.

  “No!” Sarah staggered to her feet, shaking her head. “You lied to me! You don’t want to help me at all! You’re just like them!” Her face was twitching, its slack, sedated look giving way to something else. She was fighting hard against the drugs coursing through her veins. Jess wondered at Sarah’s strength while at the same time she felt her own heart rate increase, the hair on her arms beginning to stand on end. The strange disorientation she had felt during her first visit returned as the temperature around her plummeted still more, as her icy breath plumed around her face.

  A shimmering in the air, as behind her she heard a door open; a shout.

  She turned through the sudden, drifting mind-fog; saw Wasserman and three others there on the doorstep, two of them in uniform. “Wait!” Wasserman cried, his face bleached white, his lips a purple, bloodless wound. “Get away from her! Get away!”

  Jess turned back again through a slow-motion dream. Sarah stood on the lawn under gathering shadow, her arms tight at her sides, her hands balled into fists. Her body trembled as a sudden wind grew and whipped through her hair.

  “Get back!” someone else shouted from far away. “She’s not under yet!”

  The man from the guardhouse started running. The two men in uniform rushed past Jess and jumped at Sarah’s trembling, shuddering form. They met, collided, rolling, Sarah’s feet drumming the ground as the seizure ripped up and through her.

  Darkness met, joined, spread over their heads. A deep rumbling began below their feet.

  And then it was as if the very air exploded. Jess threw herself to the ground, covered her head with her arms, as everything around her shuddered and rocked like blows from the fists of a giant.

  Cries from the men still on the steps; she looked up, shocked, unbelieving, as something began to fall and the men ran, as the rain of great black stones thundered down on the roof and walls of the Wasserman Facility and shook the earth.

  —19—

  The familiar larger brick and stone structures that made up the city had long since given way to smaller, private homes by the time Jess Chambers reached the Dorris-Edgecomb Non-denominational Church. Her hands clenched on the wheel as she thought about what she might be giving up by coming here. It was night and the lights were dark, but she had called ahead and she knew they would be waiting for her.

  The Church was an old clapboard structure that had once been in the Episcopal fold, before the church board (controlled by several prominent members of the business community and a great deal of money) led a small mutiny and convinced the congregation to go independent. At the heart of the dispute was the church’s growing belief in what they called the “new science.”

  The Organization for the Study of New Science had been on their own and a licensed nonprofit by the state for over ten years now. They were interested in not only the spirituality of man but also man’s potential to evolve as a spiritual and physical being, to stretch the boundaries of accepted scientific phenomenon. The OSNS believed in life after death; they believed in man’s capacity to overcome. They also believed that the full power of the mind had only begun to be explored.

  Jess had learned most of this from Charlie, who had insisted on setting up a meeting for her that very night. She was driving Charlie’s car too; another favor insisted upon and finally accepted.

  The leaves had turned and the air had a late-fall bite. Stepping from the car, she thought of afternoon walks home from school in Maine, haying time in the fields, apple picking, and wood-burning stoves. For a moment she slipped into the false comfort of memory, and struggled to hold on to the mood, for she did not know when it would come again.

  Most of her usual remembrances were filled with drunken neighbors and yapping dogs chained to dirt tracks between mobile homes. The grass would be worn to crackling wisps of spotty brown. Other families would hang their laundry there to dry, until the fall days turned so cold they would go out one morning to find the shirts and socks all frozen stiff and hanging like cardboard from the line.

  When she knocked at the big church doors there was no answer. It was not until she moved around to a side entrance that she had any luck. A short, scruffy young man with curly blond hair and a goatee introduced himself as Ronald Gee. Gee moved as if he were intent on slipping through space with the least possible resist
ance. He led her through a short hallway to a set of narrow stairs leading down to a white-painted door with a sticker that read PSIGN: WE KNEW YOU WERE COMING, and a smaller sign that hung from the doorknob, EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS. Music bled faintly through the walls.

  “Shhh,” Gee said, finger to his lips. She couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. His mouth held a permanent half smirk. “They’re creating a mood. It was no good earlier but they might have it by now.”

  He pushed open the door. The OSNS had strained the basement of the church well beyond its original design. Tables and file cabinets lined the walls and middle space, the rest filled with laboratory and electronic equipment: microscopes, computers, and related peripherals, and other unrecognizable machines. A large refrigerator/freezer occupied a corner. Shelves held jar after jar of medical specimens. Unrecognizable objects floated in milky fluid.

  It was impossible not to feel cramped. Jess felt everything crowding at her, demanding her attention. She felt like ducking her head, though the ceilings were at least ten feet.

  At the far end of the basement was a tiny observation room she had not noticed at first. Gee led her closer. Through a plate-glass window, a man and woman faced each other with their hands clasped across a wooden table and their eyes closed. The woman had a blood pressure cuff attached to one arm and electrodes fastened to her forehead.

  A tall, slender man stood just outside, watching a set of monitors with a clipboard in his hand. Classical music played from somewhere out of sight.

  The woman opened her eyes. “Close the door, Gee,” she said. “I can’t think with all that going on.”

  “Close it yourself. I’d like to see that sometime. One of you sensitives actually doing something.”

  “Cut it out, Gee,” the tall man said, coming out and looking at Jess. “We’re all familiar with your opinion.” He introduced himself as Patrick Elwes and spoke with a slight lisp. He was olive-skinned and serious, with round, frameless glasses and dark hair cropped tight against his scalp. His face was handsome and boyish, at odds with the rest of him.

  “You’re Charlie’s friend. Dr. Chambers, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not a doctor. Quite a setup you’ve got here.”

  Patrick smiled in an awkward, pleased way that reminded her of a proud parent. “We make do. They won’t let us in any other place in town. Scared of the publicity.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Gee’s theory.”

  “Oh. Gee is of the opinion,” Patrick said, “that table raising, lévitation of any kind actually, is beyond the scope of psi. Gee is what we call an informed skeptic.”

  “Which just means that I’m withholding judgment,” Gee said loudly. “Isn’t that what proper experimenters do?”

  She motioned toward the two others in the observation room, who were pretending to watch each other but kept glancing at her and then looking away. “Are they all right?”

  “I think they’re playing hard to get. Bilecki is a sensitive; she may already know all about you. The other one is James something. I just met him myself today.”

  “What were you doing over there again?”

  “Table lévitation. Attempting it anyway. We can’t even get Bilecki’s heart rate up, and her beta waves are too flat. It’s no good.”

  “I knew it,” Gee said. “Parlor tricks. We should get David Copperfield down here, it’d be more entertaining.”

  “That isn’t what Miss Chambers has come here to see. I believe she has something very interesting to share with us.”

  They waited, watching her. Jess took a deep breath. “What has Charlie told you?”

  “Only that you may have had a genuine psi experience. It really isn’t that unusual,” Patrick said. “You don’t have to feel that you can’t discuss it. We treat that sort of thing very seriously here. It’s what we do.”

  “I really don’t know what I have to tell you,” she said. “If I was sure, I wouldn’t have come. Let’s just say I wanted to explore my options.”

  “Have you read the book The Reach of the Mind, Miss Chambers?”

  “I…skimmed it.”

  “Rhine is a legend. The man who started it all. He coined the terms parapsychology, psychokinesis. What we call the Reach.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “The interaction of the mind with physical space. Mental energy. Mind over matter, you might say.” Seeing her skepticism, Patrick explained, “It isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Cases are continuing to surface, documented cases involving hundreds of scientists across the world. There are plenty of frauds out there trying to make a buck, but there are others. True sensitives.”

  “Like Bilecki here?”

  Patrick smiled. “When the conditions are right, she’s quite remarkable. It’s rare to find a subject able to perform on command. So, what is it you’ve seen?”

  “I don’t really know. But levitating tables can’t begin to describe it.”

  A sudden silence descended upon the group. Looking at the faces surrounding her, Jess said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.”

  Patrick studied her, the way she held her briefcase in both hands. “It would be better to talk in private,” he said.

  —20—

  “Charlie tells me you’re a flier,” Patrick said, lighting a candle near the upstairs door.

  They had retreated into the deserted church. Gentle moonlight glowed through stained glass. The candlelight flickered across the backs of empty pews, sparked against something hidden within the shadows of the altar.

  “I have a license, yes.”

  “What’s that like?” he asked almost dreamily, his voice echoing back as he walked away from her along the wall, lighting more candles. As it grew the light gave life to the carvings, made the walls and stained glass figures dance like merry ghosts.

  Jess felt a little off balance. She wasn’t sure exactly what she thought of Patrick Elwes, but something about him made her want to hurry to catch up.

  “Like freedom,” she said. “At its best, weightlessness. Like a dream.”

  “And at its worst?”

  “A way of avoiding things, I suppose. An escape, when running away isn’t always the best choice. And sometimes it’s a little hairy, especially in bad weather.”

  “I’ve always wanted to learn to fly.”

  “You’ve been up before?”

  “No, never. I’m scared to death of it too. Isn’t that crazy?”

  “There are worse things to be afraid of.”

  Patrick nodded, turning back to face her. “How right you are.”

  They sat down next to each other in the front pew, Patrick with his long legs stretched out in front, Jess with her briefcase clutched on her lap.

  Jess had the faintly unsettling feeling, half dream and half memory, of kneeling in front of an altar much like this one when she was a little girl. Her mother had dragged her to the Congregational church one Sunday morning to offer some kind of penance, the details of which had gone over her head. But she remembered a feeling of quiet dread mixed with embarrassment, as if they were interlopers at a private party.

  Today she felt like speaking in whispers, as if they might be disturbing someone here in this empty house of God.

  “I hope you don’t mind the candles. I find it peaceful. And when it’s not so bright, the neighbors don’t notice the lights on and call the police.” He smiled. “There’s a rumor going around that the place is haunted. We like it, actually. It keeps the attention away from what we’re doing.”

  Jess was trying not to stare at his eyes, which she had noticed were two slightly different colors, hazel and a light misty gray. They held the candlelight in their centers like tiny flickering suns.

  The effect was distracting. She wondered if something had happened to him when he was young that had affected the pigment. He had a very slight accent that she couldn’t quite place, or perhaps a speech impediment that he h
ad spent many hours trying to erase.

  “Heterochromia iridium,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s the scientific name for two different color eyes. Relatively rare in people, but it happens pretty frequently in other species. Science used to believe eye color was controlled by one gene, but it’s been established as polygenic.

  It’s an inherited trait. Most common cause is a mutation of the PAX3 gene on chromosome 2q35.”

  “I’m sorry. I was staring, wasn’t I?”

  “No problem.” Patrick smiled. “Hypnotic, aren’t they? Helped me get away with a lot more mischief when I was a kid.”

  “They’re beautiful. So, how do you know Charlie?”

  “We grew up together. She was always trying to get me to go out with her, but I refused.” Candlelight flickered in across his features. She could not tell if he was being serious at first. “Actually, I suppose you could say I had a crush on her. She lived just down the block and was a year older. A real exotic beauty.”

  “She’s told you all about me?”

  “Only a very faint idea of why you might come. And about your flying airplanes.”

  Jess considered how to begin. “This doesn’t leave the room. It involves a patient I’m helping to treat and so any information I tell you is confidential. Can I trust you with that?”

  “Of course.”

  “This person—a young girl—has been treated for a schizophreniform disorder for several years. While in this girl’s company I have been witness to several strange events. Light-bulbs exploding. Drops in temperature. Jammed door locks. These things seem to happen when the girl is upset or under stress. I have spoken with several members of the girl’s family and they insisted that similar events occurred almost from the moment of her birth. And then, this morning…”

  “Go on.”

  “We were outside the hospital. She became upset, didn’t want to go back inside. There were men there who tried to restrain her, the hospital director as well. It got very dark, very cold—this happened extremely quickly—I don’t know how to say this. Large black rocks—chunks of ice and stones, actually—began to fall from the sky like rain. And it was clear to me that somehow, this girl was causing it to happen.”