by Nate Kenyon
Betrayal stung her like a slap to the face. “Sarah’s not the devil. She’s just a little girl.”
“Let’s assume she’s the product of some random genetic mutation. But do you think it’s a coincidence that my cancer began nearly ten years ago? I had no family history, no previous symptoms. I contracted what is almost exclusively a childhood disease, caused by changes in the cells of the bone marrow, changes that have been linked to high doses of radiation or exposure to toxins. Somehow she lashed out at me—I felt it—and she did something to me. She changed me. At the cellular level.
“When she was barely a minute old, I saw her tear a building apart. What do you think she’s capable of now?”
Jess had no idea what to say. During the taxi ride she had gone over and over in her head how she would present her case, and again and again she had come up against the same problem. Shelley was a pragmatist. She would never believe it.
And now here she was, saying that she believed every word. Worse, she had known about Sarah’s talents from the beginning.
“My God, listen to me,” Shelley said. “I’m a doctor, for God’s sake. But it happened. It happened.”
“I don’t know what she’s done to you, or what she’s capable of doing. I can’t answer to any of that. But we’re responsible for her, as a human being. She deserves a chance to live her life. I want to take her to see someone who has experience with this sort of thing, a parapsychologist—”
“Evan’s under a tremendous amount of pressure, more than you can imagine. He’ll never go for something like that. And he’ll never let you take her out of the hospital alone.”
“Then you’ll have to help me.”
“Impossible.”
“You brought me into this for a reason. You wanted me to reach her, and I have. I can’t believe you would stop now. Imagine if she were your child. She’s just a little girl, no matter what you say she’s capable of, what she’s done. She scared, and she’s alone. We owe her this. You owe her this.”
“I don’t owe her anything.”
“How can you say that? She’s spent most of her life behind the bars of that place. She’s been drugged and restrained to keep her docile. You put her there. You sentenced her to that prison. And if you don’t help me right now, if you don’t give me the chance to get her out, I will go to the authorities for child abuse charges. Then it will all be out in the open. This will be over, one way or the other.”
“It will kill her if you do it that way. You know that, don’t you? The media pressure, the people falling over themselves to get at her. She’ll be destroyed, just as if you’d held a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”
Jess had gained her feet. She found that she was breathing hard, and her throat felt tight. She fought to regain control of herself. “Then help me now,” she said. “Help me do what’s right for her.”
For a moment she thought Shelley wasn’t going to answer her at all. Various emotions passed across her face like ghosts. And then something seemed to move like a shudder through the professor’s body, and she nodded.
“This isn’t because of any threat of exposure. I’m beyond that now, understand? But you’re right, I did bring you into this for a reason. It’s time to force the issue, one way or the other. Evan’s gone too far with her and it has to end.
“I’ll call him to set up a private meeting off-premises for Sunday afternoon. They’ll be at minimum staff then. Do you know Jeffrey? I helped place him there, nearly ten years ago now. He’s an old patient of mine, in fact. He trusts me, and he’ll do what I say. He’ll help you get past the guard.”
She stood with effort, pain etched across her face. “I can’t go with you. I hope you understand. From then on, you’re on your own.”
—25—
“Okay, Sarah,” Patrick said. “We’re all friends here. I want you to try to relax.”
They were huddled around the table in the tiny observation room of the church basement: Patrick, Gee, Jess, Sarah, and Connor the stuffed bear. It hadn’t taken them long to get there. Jeffrey had seemed more than willing to cover for them, and he was good at it. In fact, he had done much more than that, getting Sarah upstairs and into the back of Charlie’s car without drawing suspicion, and providing a distraction for the man at the gate so that they could get out without anyone noticing a thing.
But Jess was already looking at her watch. She couldn’t be sure how long Wasserman would be gone, and what would she have accomplished if they were caught?
What she hadn’t counted on was Sarah’s resistance. The girl had been willing to go with her, eager to see the outside again. But when she explained what they were going to do, Sarah grew upset. No, Jess thought, it had been more than that; she had become frantic. It took everything Jess had to convince her that she would be all right, that these were friends who wanted to help her. Even now, she looked ready to bolt at any moment.
The empty worship hall hung like an expectant audience above their heads. Already she was regretting the decision to come. She was trying to reason, to find alternatives. Shelley had simply buckled under the terrible pressure of her disease, and was spending the rest of her life trying to deny the fact that her body had forsaken her. As for Sarah’s grandmother, she was crazy as a shit-house rat; and what about all those strange things Jess herself had witnessed? There were explanations, there had to be. Perfectly reasonable solutions. If only she could find them.
Yes, the whole thing was crazy. What could possibly happen now, here under the lights and the intensely scrutinizing eyes of Patrick and Gee? And how could she put Sarah through this? She had told the girl that they were her friends, but what did she really know about this group, other than what Charlie had told her? They were certainly odd, but whether it went further than that, she couldn’t tell.
She felt like a wrecking ball gathering speed and coming loose through its swing. This carelessness wasn’t like her. Damn it, you should have checked things out more carefully. You know better than that.
But there hadn’t been time. And it was too late now.
“We’re going to run a few tests, nothing serious, but I’m going to have a look at your brain waves, and we’ll record your heartbeat and blood pressure and respiration. There’s nothing that’s going to hurt, and nothing to be afraid of, okay?” Patrick fiddled with the contacts that had been taped to Sarah’s skull. He was very gentle with her, adjusting the cuff around her upper arm. “Can I talk to you for a moment, please?” He gestured Jess out into the larger chamber and closed the door.
“This isn’t going to work if you can’t calm her down,” he said, when they were out of earshot. “She can feel your nervousness. I can feel it. There’s something on your mind. Let’s get it out.”
“I was just wondering why, if this sort of psychic phenomena is as widespread and proven as you say, we all haven’t heard about it.”
Patrick looked at her oddly for a moment. His lighter-colored eye seemed to bore into her, searching for her private heart. She felt uncomfortable and crossed her arms. “You have, you just don’t know it. Let me tell you something. In 1985 the Army Research Institute was commissioned by Congress to study aspects of psychic phenomena. In their subsequent report they said that the data they had reviewed constituted genuine scientific anomalies for which no one had an adequate explanation. There was no scientific answer to what they had seen. And yet nobody listened. The report was buried, along with four others that said the same thing. In 1989, Radin and Ferrari at Princeton used meta-analysis to evaluate 148 different die-casting experiments performed during the last fifty years. They eliminated all except the most scientific and rigid of the group. What was left still proved the existence of psi with the odds against chance of more than a trillion to one.
“The truth is, the Defense Department has been conducting secret parapsychological experiments for years. Psi isn’t a belief anymore. It’s a proven fact. The data is there.”
“So what are you telling me
? There’s some sort of conspiracy?”
“Absolutely.”
An intercom clicked into life. “Come on,” Gee said loudly from inside the observation room. His round, scruffy face peered through the window in the door. “Let’s get the show on the road. I gotta get home and watch The OC on Tivo. It’s a new episode, you know.”
Jess wondered for a moment how it might feel to get her hands around Gee’s skinny little neck.
“Calm yourself,” Patrick said. “We’re coming.” To her, more gently, he said, “We’ve got to get Sarah to relax, to enter a premeditative state more conducive to psi. She’s too tense, there’s something upsetting her. But you have her trust. We can’t do it without you. What have you got to lose?”
Jess held her breath, let it out slowly. “If she shows any signs of discomfort, seizure, anything at all, we stop. Immediately. All right?”
“You’re the boss.”
She had to admit, even before they began the serious testing (if such things as die-casting and random number generators could be called serious), that there was a feeling of heavy expectation in the air. Sarah seemed to sense her change of mood, as soon as they rejoined the others. Now she tugged at Jess’s hand, and whispered in her ear, “I don’t like it here.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“Do you?”
“Not just yet. Are you scared?”
“I don’t like tests. I don’t want anything bad to happen!”
“Then we’ll just make sure it doesn’t.”
“I had a dream last night,” Sarah said. “I was in a big room and I was really mad. And I was hurting people.”
“Recording,” Gee said, bent close to a nearby glowing screen. A machine nearby started spitting out jagged lines on paper. “I’m getting betas. She’s ready to roll.”
“All right,” Patrick said. He was standing in front of a bank of electrical devices with quivering needles and gauges. “Blood pressure slightly elevated, within normal parameters. Heartbeat coming down. Let go of her hand, Sarah, that’s right, you can hold Connor. We won’t bite you. I’m detecting a slight magnetic or electrical field. Overheads, Gee.”
Gee turned a dimmer switch. The narrow room was transformed with a soothing wash of pink light.
“Can you tell me any more about your dream?”
“There were people coming after me and I was running, I was looking for my mother but I couldn’t find her, and I hid in a big room and they were going to catch me.…I was doing things. I couldn’t stop.”
“I had a dream like that too. My brother was in it. But then I woke up and I realized it was just a dream. And dreams can’t hurt you.”
“But I was so mad!”
“We all get angry sometimes. But anger is something you can control.”
“I don’t like tests,” she said again. Her fingers clutched at Jess’s wrist. “No needles?”
“No, honey,” Jess said. “I promise.”
Patrick had returned with a set of headphones to the chair where Sarah sat, and he picked up a pair of halved Ping-Pong balls and began to tape them carefully over her eyes. They had lined the tabletop with pillows in order to make her more comfortable, and now he helped her climb up on them and lie down. “This is called the Ganzfeld approach,” he said, into the strange pink light. “It’s simply a way of allowing the mind to concentrate by reducing the amount of sensory stimuli. We’ll turn on some music, and all I want you to do is relax, and try not to think about anything.”
To Jess, he said, “I was thinking about the contents of that file. The people who put that together were aware that something unusual was going on with her. You don’t take those kinds of tests, you don’t record that kind of data without a reason. Gee, tweak the frequencies, will you? I’m getting some feedback.”
“It’s not me,” Gee said. “Everything peachy here. Sure it isn’t coming from your head?”
“Very amusing,” Patrick said. “Pay attention, please.” To Jess, he said, “So what else is our good hospital director hiding from you? That would be my question. If I were asking the questions, I mean.”
“I guess it’s lucky for him you’re not.”
Patrick left the room briefly and touched a button on a CD player. They were surrounded by gentle piano and strings. “Sarah, you’re going to feel sleepy, you’re going to feel like you’re floating. I’m going to put these headphones on you to make that easier. Jess, why don’t you take a seat? Gee, what are we reading?”
Chopin rolled and swelled within the basement chambers. Sarah lay on her back with her eyes closed, holding Connor while Patrick and Gee tended to the machines, conversed quietly, and took notes. Finally Jess pulled Patrick aside. “This isn’t working.”
“We’re getting normal readings.”
“That’s just what I mean. Whenever something happened, something unusual, Sarah was in an extremely agitated state. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere by hypnotizing her.”
“So you want to piss her off?” Gee said, coming over. “I could give it a shot.”
“We’re going to start running her through a series of escalating steps. This is just to allow her to reach an alpha plateau….”
“I dunno, though. She might melt my brain or something,” Gee was saying. “Maybe I’ll pass.”
“Hush,” Patrick said. “Why don’t you check her readings, Gee? You’re the best at it.” When Gee had turned back to the bank of machines, and a second printer buzzed into life, he said softly, “He knows this isn’t a joke. It’s just his way of blowing off steam.”
“I’m sure.”
“Really,” Patrick said. “If he hadn’t come here, he’d be working on his Ph.D. at Duke. We’re lucky to have him. But he’s never been much of a people person, an only child and all that. His parents were both physicists and they were gone a lot. I don’t think he had much of a social life.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Patrick turned to a small monitor where an animated flipping coin played out across the screen. “This is a random number generator, fully automatic data recording. It uses radioactive decay times to provide electronic spikes at several thousand times a second. Heads is one, tails is zero. The computer chooses randomly, with the chance of one or zero being equal over time.
“We’re going to ask her to influence the pattern. I’d expect hits in the range of fifty-three to fifty-five percent over time, if things go well.”
“That doesn’t seem terribly significant.”
“The odds against it are billions to one. Now, I’d have done a blood test but I’m afraid I’d frighten her. Do you know what she’s been given in the past to control her mood?”
“Sodium amytal, mostly.”
“Sodium amytal, hmmm. Rhine used that exact drug to practically eliminate psi effects during his tests at Duke. Your director knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“We’re getting alphas, but they’re slipping,” Gee said. “You better hurry. She’s gonna fall asleep.”
Patrick took a deep breath. “I want you to get her up and bring her out here. Gently, now, you can take off the Ping-Pong balls and blood pressure monitor but don’t loosen the contacts, they’ll reach. Don’t make her nervous.”
They sat down facing the random number generator and Patrick refastened the blood pressure cuff, Sarah trailing wires from her skull. She was still clutching Connor, but her eyes kept closing and she seemed deeply relaxed, as if in a trance. Patrick explained to her that the coin flipping across the screen was a computer image that corresponded to the numbers one and zero, and that she must try to make the image come up heads. She must try to think of the number one, or the image on the coin. His voice was slow and deep and soothing. Jess could not tell whether Sarah heard him or not.
They sat back and all watched the screen. The coin would bounce, flip, then bounce, flip again; after a while it seemed that tails was coming up more frequently. Two in a row. Three. Six.
Finally a long,
straight line of tails had flashed across the screen. Sarah frowned. She sat up a bit straighter in her chair and stared at the flipping coin.
“I’m getting betas,” Gee said. “No, wait, hold on, something’s happening here—we’ve got alphas with very high peaks—it’s like Mt. Everest over here.”
“She’s fighting herself,” Patrick said, voice quiet and tight with excitement. “You see that, Gee? It’s a reverse pattern.”
“I see it,” Gee said. His voice had lost all traces of sarcasm as he collected a steady stream of spitting paper printout. “You gotta look at these betas, I’ve never…”
“It happens sometimes,” Patrick was saying, almost to himself, “people fight their own minds and do the opposite. If she’s afraid of what she might do, if she’s trying not to make it happen—”
“Whoa,” Gee said. “Hold on. Jesus. She’s off the chart.”
Sarah was sweating lightly, her eyes wide open now, her little brow furrowed, mouth tight. A steady line of tails streamed across the computer screen.
The screen shivered; blinked. The temperature in the room had dropped. Jess felt the hairs on her arms rise up to meet it. Once again she was confronted with the familiar feeling of electricity, of a charge like an invisible presence in the room. The atmosphere had subtly changed; she held her breath and watched the air shimmer before her eyes.
The computer monitor began to smoke. A wisp curled like a gentle ghost-tongue around the plastic housing and drifted away; then the smoke grew black and thick.
“Dear Christ Almighty,” Patrick said. “Gee, get the extinguisher. Gee.”
Ronald Gee stood frozen as sparks jumped within the depths of the machine. The screen flickered and blinked again and went dark. Jess reached for Sarah’s arm. Her fingers brushed the girl’s skin and the effect was like walking across a thick carpet. She gasped. Every hair on her head prickled as she felt the charge enter her and wait, coiled.
