Caitlin was startled to feel the effects of that realization in her body. It was as though she were energized from her feet all the way up. Her torso felt bright, almost radiant; her mind was clear as the tone of a tuning fork; and she was ravenous. She rang for the hostess and asked for the menu.
Something had clicked into place, though Caitlin didn’t know what.
Over dinner, she devoured the materials Vahin had given her. She read about the combined power of souls, of prayer. Connected in the transpersonal plane, souls could form a powerful group spirit capable of ascending even higher, outside the reach of time, space . . . and death.
A cataclysm, she thought. Fire, ice, floods. A city or civilization beset by a volcano, an earthquake, a tsunami, encroaching ice. Caitlin remembered Maanik crying in their first session over an arm that had been ripped off and her dead pet that was not Jack London. Maybe that had happened to Maanik’s counterpart in some ancient place—before that counterpart had died, burned to pieces by volcanic fire or an inferno caused by tremors.
But Maanik had said that she also became pieces first and then burned. What pieces? And how?
Okay, we’ll come back to that, Caitlin thought, forcing herself to stay focused despite the mental lull caused by her full stomach.
She thought about Atash’s vision. Other residents of the city seemed not only prepared for the cataclysm but eager for it. Instead of running away from an erupting volcano, these people in robes gathered in a courtyard of columns, apparently waiting to die. Eager to die? Robes that were soaked in oil; a reference to cazh; a word and gesture meaning what? Some kind of transformation.
Those residents—Caitlin had seen them. They had a ritual they were determined to complete. Whether that rite was done to thwart the volcano or honor it in the hope of pacifying it, she wasn’t sure. But if Vahin was correct, perhaps the ritual had transported their souls to the transpersonal plane, whatever it was. Their souls left as their physical bodies burned to fine ash. Maanik’s consciousness split into fragments and lifted up as her physical body burned.
Presumably then, the souls that reached the transpersonal plane were ensured not a life after death, but life beyond the reach of death.
But why have Maanik and Gaelle and Atash connected with that? Shared trauma here and now cannot be the only reason.
Those prayerful residents in robes had denied help to Atash’s counterpart. Why had they excluded him? They had accused him of placing faith in “things without true power” and said that he had crafted his own fate. She thought of people she had seen in war zones, those who had tried to leave and those who had gathered in a place of worship and perished—difficult choices made under duress, but with the same goal.
Escape.
Then there was her father and the Norse-style longboat. Caitlin remembered Maanik talking about a dragon, perhaps a carved dragon head on a ship? Some residents may have taken to the sea, trying desperately to sail away as fire fell on an ocean already lashing them with steep waves. Atash’s counterpart may have quailed at that choice. So he had begged the robed man to save his brother through cazh instead, turning to religion as a last resort. Rebuffed by the priest, Atash’s counterpart had done the ritual without the help or sanction of the priests—and it seemed to have worked. Thousands of years later, with Antarctica long buried under ice, he had found Atash’s soul, exposed by the trauma of his brother’s execution, and somehow made his way in.
But why would that cause Atash to set himself alight? Had the soul given him the wrong message? Or—and the thought made Caitlin choke up—had that soul been trapped in that traumatic moment like some prehistoric insect preserved in amber, all this time.
Too many broad strokes, she thought, but a start. A place to go with Maanik.
Caitlin leaned back, shut her exhausted eyes, and tried not to think of Atash locked in a burning body for millennia. She thought of the animals instead. What was their role in this? Jack London had to be aware of the presence of something unseen. What about his avoiding his mistress’s right hand? One of Vahin’s booklets said that energy from the world around us entered through the left hand, the heart hand. Then, filtered by the body and soul, negative, unwanted energy exited through the right hand. Maanik’s left hand on Jack London would have safely received his loving energy. But her right hand would have been emitting all the suffering her counterpart felt in the transpersonal plane. No wonder the dog had avoided it.
As animals had avoided Washington Square—Caitlin suddenly remembered the news reports just after the rats stampeded. A resident of the area had been briefly interviewed about how her black Lab would no longer enter the dog run in Washington Square Park, and neither would anyone else’s dogs. Yet there had been no mention of the dogs avoiding their owners, only the location, and the behavior of the rats certainly didn’t resemble Jack London’s reactions. If there was a connection here, it was not apparent.
Some possible answers—more seemingly impossible questions. But at the very least, they all seemed to be pointing in the same direction. Her mind didn’t tell her this in isolation, the way it usually did—her whole self told her. She felt again the bright radiance in her sternum.
Her meal finished and cleared, Caitlin turned off her light, lifted her window shade, and leaned her head against the seat. Her eyes rested on the clouds, the deepening dusk.
Shared souls, shared trauma, she thought. If this is happening to other young people around the world, that might explain why Kashmir is rippling through those of us who don’t even know where it is. But is Kashmir causing this?
That didn’t seem likely. Yet a connection was possible. Kashmir: a locus of frustration and pain touching all the ends of the earth. The transpersonal plane: a locus of ancient pain touching all the ends of the earth.
It no longer seemed possible to her to accept one and deny the other.
CHAPTER 30
When the call came in from Mikel, Flora Davies was sound asleep on the chair in her office. Weary in mind, body, and soul, she had surrendered herself to the black leather.
Still jet-lagged despite a long rest, Mikel had wandered back to the club at four in the morning to take another look at the new artifact. He found Arni’s body in a pool of unsightly fluid and immediately called upstairs for Flora. They had at least three hours to erase the problem before any other Group members or staff came in for the day, and before anyone was likely to report Arni to Missing Persons. Friends and family knew that he was inclined to work late, especially when there was a problem to be solved.
The Group had never dealt with a dead body at the club. Not human bodies at least. Unusual creatures had occasionally found their way into the lab for study, all deceased and partial specimens hauled from the south polar waters—part of a giant squid, a ten-thousand-year-old coelacanth perfectly preserved in frozen mud, the body of a baby megalodon locked in ancient ice. They were rare, but Flora stayed in contact with a man equipped to deal with their remains. She located the contact on her phone and within minutes Casey Skett was literally running over from his walk-up in the East Village.
After hanging up, Flora went back downstairs and paced near Arni’s head while Mikel looked for clues about his death. She was cursing the Group through the disposable medical mask she had put on, angry that they did not have the equipment or personnel suitable to perform a fast autopsy.
“And look at that—Arni wasn’t even wearing his lab coat,” she railed. “God only knows what contaminants his body is adding to the environment.”
“You mean apart from liquefied brain tissue?” Mikel asked. He was also masked and kneeling beside the corpse.
She stopped pacing. “Is that what you think that is?”
“Judging by the color and small lumps of solid mass, I’d say so.”
“Lovely,” Flora said. “Nothing else unusual?”
“Not that I can see. Only the brain is where it shouldn’t be.”
She snatched latex gloves from a box on a s
helf and began pawing over Arni’s table—an insufferable mess—until she found a glass stirring rod. Then, squatting beside the corpse’s head, she inserted the end of the rod into his left nostril.
“It looks like he was about to be mummified,” Mikel muttered. “Brain out, organs next.”
“His other organs still appear to be inside,” she observed.
“Maybe I scared off whoever was doing this.”
“This liquid has a film forming on top,” she said, referring to the pool that spread like a halo from Arni’s head. “He’s been this way for a while.”
“But you didn’t hear anything?”
“Soundproofing,” she said, while paying acute attention to the shape of Arni’s nasal cavity. Flora twisted and turned the glass rod until all but the half inch she was holding had disappeared up his nose into his skull.
“My god,” she said, marveling, “there’s no sinus wall, no sphenoid bone. Mikel, there is nothing up there.”
“Are you saying everything in his skull came out of his nose?” he said in a tone of total disbelief.
“Would you like to feel it?” She motioned with the end of the glass rod.
“No,” he said, wincing slightly. “What would do that to some of his cranial bones but not the whole skull?”
“Perhaps we haven’t seen it all,” Flora replied, setting the rod on the table. She touched Arni’s head with the toe of her boot, half-expecting it to cave under the pressure. It did not. “Damn it,” she said. “I hate a mystery without enough time to solve it.”
As if on cue, Casey Skett arrived, still as skinny and slack-eyed as he had been a decade earlier when Flora first found him. Mikel went upstairs to admit him and they rode down in the elevator. Casey worked for the Department of Sanitation, “DAR” division—dead animal removal. He was good at his job, but Flora also appreciated his discretion and his connection to the shelters—specifically, the ones with incinerators. He lifted Arni’s body into a refrigerator on wheels with its contents and shelves removed. If anyone happened to notice Casey wandering around the shelter before dawn, he would say he was cleaning up more of the dead, decaying rats that had been in the news—did they want to take a look inside?
Flora and Mikel then spent forty-five minutes triple-washing the floor and two agonizing hours scrutinizing every inch of the laboratory and the locker room for anything that might catch the eye of a police officer. Then Flora went ahead and scuffed and dirtied things up, so the lab didn’t look too scrubbed.
When they were done, Mikel went about seeking a potential cause. He’d noticed hours ago that his carved meteorite was sitting on the table and the Geiger counter was out. He approached the object cautiously and waved the wand over it for several minutes but nothing happened. Finally, he picked it up, wrapped it in cloth, and strode to the safe to stow it.
“Not there,” Flora said. “We’re putting all the relics in the deep freezer.”
“For what?”
“As a precaution,” she replied.
“Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” Mikel asked.
“As my great-uncle Commander Hunt said during the Blitz, ‘One cannot overreact to this.’ Anyway, it’s my prerogative.”
“But we don’t know that this or any of them had anything to do with Arni’s death.”
“We don’t know they didn’t.”
“That argument is ridiculous,” he said. “We have to try and reconstruct what he was doing—”
“And we will, after we’ve had a pause and a good think. I’ve read your report about the trip. There isn’t a damned thing in this building that we know as little about.”
His impatience evident, he held up his find. “Which is why we need this here, now. This has more writing than any of them. We can learn from it.”
“We will,” she said. “Please, Mikel—consider all that’s happened already, the rats in Washington Square, the birds around your plane. Those phenomena all have artifact proximity and they began after this thing started its journey.” She shook her head ruefully. “Arni was a synesthete. These objects may be connecting with animal and possibly human consciousness on some level. Perhaps there was something emitted by this rock at an inaudible frequency, triggered by a certain kind of light or sound, perhaps, for example, the electrical output of an airplane or a Geiger counter.”
“The rats weren’t anywhere near my artifact.”
“They were not,” she agreed. “But they came running here, to the collection. Which is why I want all the objects stowed and stabilized until we’ve examined this more thoroughly.”
Mikel shook his head. “That’s the reason we have to keep studying them now, Flora, while they are being influenced. And I mean, why freeze it? Why not superheat it?”
Flora snatched it from his hand.
“You’re being a little extreme here,” he said.
“Arni is dead!” she said, showing the first real sign of emotion.
“I’m sorry too but we have a bigger picture here,” Mikel insisted, “a force we don’t understand and that we haven’t understood for a long damn time. Being able to read some of the symbols is one thing. We’re getting pretty good at that. Understanding the mechanics of these objects is bigger.”
“You don’t think I know that?”
“Of course you do. Look, this thing has obviously been through tremendous heat before and survived. Arni didn’t heat it—no burner. No cigarette lighter. I don’t think we’re going to know the full extent of its functionality until we start ruling things out.”
Flora turned away. “It goes in the deep freezer with the rest, since we know that all of these artifacts have survived low temperatures for thousands of years without killing anyone, and that’s final.”
“How do you know that?”
She half-turned. “What?”
“That they haven’t killed anyone before?”
She hesitated for the briefest moment. “You’re right. I don’t know. All the more reason for caution.” Then, without another word, she went to the locker, loaded all the objects onto a tray, and navigated to a room down the hall. She packed each item in a plastic bag and put them away. When she returned, Mikel was leaning on the wall outside the lab, pouting. She flicked off the light, slammed the door shut, and followed him up the stairs.
“Go home,” she said. “Get some rest.”
“I’m rested. I want to work.”
“Then go to the library and read. Finish watching the videos Erika collected.”
“Why are you being like this?”
“Like what?” she asked. “Thinking?”
Mikel said nothing as they neared the landing. The old stairs creaked as they ascended in the near-darkness. Upstairs the phone was already ringing. Mikel fielded the first call from the police. Arni had been reported missing at seven a.m. by a friend he was supposed to meet the night before, and the floodgates opened. Flora was glad she had put the artifacts away: only now it occurred to her that they may have been seized as evidence.
The rest of that day was filled with exhaustive questioning by an ill-tempered detective and with open and measurable concern for Arni while police inspected every corner of the laboratory space and locker room. Flora’s mind was on the deep freezer but they only checked it and did not violate its contents.
Finally, at midnight she summoned Mikel from home and ordered him back to the Falklands.
“For what?” he asked, not displeased but surprised.
“I’ve thought,” she announced. “Do whatever you have to do to get access to the crew of the Captain Fallow. Find out where they located your artifact. Where there was one, there may be more.”
“We’ve been down that road before with other artifacts,” he said.
“That’s true,” she agreed. “But as far as we know, they never caused any brains to melt. I think your artifact is too small to generate power on its own. So a theoretical external power source, the cause of this phenomenon, would likely be on th
e other end, where the artifact is from. It may still be connected with that source, if there is one, still charged somehow.”
He agreed with her decision. Favors were called in, arrangements made. Thankfully, Flora’s sleepless night and her genuine tears the following morning had convinced the detective on his second visit that she was worried sick about Arni.
And now here she was, alone with a cup of tea . . . and, literally, for now, at a cold, dead end to their quest. She lifted her teacup and hurled it at the wall, her mind burning with frustration and rage.
Goddamn it. Enough! she said to the mysterious race she had spent half her life pursuing. If you have anything to say to me, say it bloody faster.
CHAPTER 31
It was midnight. Outside Caitlin’s cab the cloudy sky reflected orange from the lights of the city—a sight that had always struck her as ominous. It seemed more so now: danger felt imminent. The rattling of the taxi’s undercarriage was like the world itself, barely holding itself together as it hurtled onward.
Or this could just be jet lag, she told herself.
She’d called her father while she waded through customs, but Jacob was asleep and she didn’t want to wake him. As she waited in line at the curb, chilly and impatient, she read two texts Ben had sent while she was in the air. The first was sent at 7:41 p.m.: Found possible Viking Mongolian connection.
And then at 11:11 p.m.: Am with Maanik. Stopped them from medicating her.
She called and he picked up on the first ring. Whatever tension there was between them when she left for Iran was gone, at least from his voice.
“Tell me you’re back—”
“I’m back,” she said. “What happened?”
He hesitated.
“Ben, if anyone’s listening—we’re beyond that.”
A Vision of Fire: A Novel Page 22
