Lying here now, in the deep autumn quiet of his room, Peter discovered a tiny pocket of that sensation still intact, expanding outward as he drifted toward sleep, eeling its way through his body like a drug. He imagined himself humming like a tuning fork, his very molecules becoming so agitated they began to defy gravity. . . and float.
The thunder. The thunder was back.
Fearful of the dream, Peter opened his eyes. . . but the thunder was the real thing. Sleet tapped impatiently at the thermal panes, and flash-glares printed negatives of the room on his retinas.
A freak autumn thunderstorm.
Peter gazed through the bleary windows of his eyes at the bedside clock and discovered that he'd been in that vibratory semitrance for an hour, though it had seemed like only minutes.
Thunder cracked, rolled. . .
And Peter slept.
When he awoke he was sitting in the chair at the foot of his bed. But no. . . it wasn't his bed, couldn't be, because there was someone else asleep in it. The room was dark, the only light a pale yellow fan from the corridor beyond the nearly shut door.
It wasn't his bed, but it was his room. There was his TASH environmental control unit on the shelf by the bed. Technical Aids and Systems for the Handicapped. Great stuff. If you could blow out a candle, you could "control your environment." He had a fourteen-inch color TV, a Sony VCR, a Hitachi tape player, and a case full of tapes, all of which he could control with a slight puff of air—and all of it compliments of Sam.
Now his eyes scanned right, to the stuffed floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and the nightstand in which he stored the few remaining artifacts of his old life, items too painful to list. And there was the poster of the CT-114s, its edges already curling. According to the digital clock, it was six minutes past five in the morning. The worst of the storm had passed, but sleet still ticked at the window glass.
He looked again at the sheet-covered hump.
Who's that sleeping in my bed?
With dreamlike ease (that's what this is it's a dream) Peter rose to his feet. . . and then off his feet. From a yard above his bed, he looked down at himself.
A sudden panicky fear bludgeoned him. Was he dying again? Or worse, already dead?
So what if you are?
Yeah. So what?
But he didn't want to die. Not anymore.
He wanted to fly.
Dead?
No. The gimp Walkman was functioning perfectly, its red LED flashing with each electrical impulse it dispatched to his diaphragm. Beneath the sheets his chest rose and fell.
He drifted closer, noticing that beneath his eyelids the globes of his eyes flickered in the crazed, trapped-animal patterns of REM sleep.
He was dreaming.
Closer. . .
Then two things happened simultaneously. First, a breathless sensation of free-fall that was a lot like being sucked whole into a vacuum. And second, a repulsion so savage it seemed to tear his essence to shreds. Repulsion from the bony, misshapen mess in that bed, from the open-grave stench of the bedsores that cratered its butt, from the incomprehensible truth of its existence. . . and its identity.
The repulsion won out. In a heartbeat he was back at the foot of his bed, still standing but winded, punchy, reeling in the clutches of nausea.
A shadow crept by in the hallway, stretching itself out like ghostly toffee before vanishing in a squeak of crepe-soled shoes.
Shawna Blane, Peter thought, dull anger mingling in a brooding backwater of his mind with an old and bitter arousal. The animosity between them, which had begun about a year ago, had been born innocently enough. Peter had misread Shawna Blane, mistaking her pity for interest. And one late night as she was turning him, he had asked her to. . . touch him. One of his unbidden erections—which he was somehow aware of, a sort of faraway ache perceived more by the brain than the groin—had bobbed up when she drew back the sheets, and it had made him wonder if, were she to stroke him, then maybe, just maybe, he might feel it, at least at a psychological level, and perhaps even ejaculate. Shawna had always seemed so cheerful around him, so friendly, touching his face, engaging him in an ongoing, faintly sexual banter—or so he had judged at the time—that never failed to arouse him. Asking her to touch him that night, in the silent tomb of the vegetable ward, had seemed so. . . right. He'd sincerely believed that she wanted to.
What a chump.
Shawna had flipped out, called him a disgusting, horny little veg, and then slapped him in the face, where she knew he could feel it. Peter had retaliated in one of the few ways left open to him, by hurling insults at her in a voice that trembled with humiliation and rage.
Somewhere outside, a muffled voice called Shawna's name.
"Hold on," Peter heard the dream-Shawna answer. "I've got to tinkle."
Dream?
Peter didn't think so.
He crossed on unfelt feet to the door, reached for the knob. . . and watched gleefully as his hand passed unimpeded through its substance. With a smile, he glanced back at his bedridden body and thought he saw it vibrating, ever so slightly.
Then he waltzed through the thickness of the door into the muted light of the corridor.
Walking at first, then lofting like a gull on an updraft, Peter followed Shawna Blane to the ninth-floor loo. She closed the door as he got there. . . so he simply passed through it.
His timing was perfect. Shawna was just hiking up her skirt. . . and oh, sweet Jesus, she was wearing a garter belt! She wiggled out of a pair of bikini panties—revealing a set of powder-white buns which in their plump perfection surpassed even his wildest imaginings—then turned with what Peter chose to interpret as deliberate slowness. . . and before she perched on the porcelain hoop, she allowed him a fleeting glimpse of heaven. He heard a faint, tinkling hiss as Shawna let go—and then, to his total shock and dismal disappointment, such a thunderous and sloppy passage of wind that he found himself instantaneously returned to his room, his formerly keen arousal burst like a balloon at a dart toss. In all his life, the few times he'd even considered it, he had never imagined a beautiful woman capable of such a thing.
Floating above it, fighting a fresh wave of revulsion, Peter looked down at his body again. He could see an erection poking up under the sheets.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a large commercial jet outside his window, landing lights twisting, the huge torpedo of its body declining with smooth majesty toward the Sudbury Airport, twenty miles north of the city.
All else was forgotten as he stood on the waist-high windowsill and watched the plane complete its descent. It was a 747, an uncommon visitor to this barren north country, and as always, its massive size astonished him. He had hopped up here—floated, really—the instant he'd spotted the airliner.
The yearning was deep now. Deep and compelling.
Peter leaned forward, to press his face to the cool glass. . . and met no resistance at all. With a gut-clutching lurch, he pitched forward through the window, leaving it intact. The frost-sugared lawn hurtled solidly up at him, and he felt as if his entire being had compressed itself into the dry well of his throat. Bare yards from the ground, he pulled up his nose. . .
And soared into the coming dawn.
He rose in a breathtaking vertical thrust, like a warhead, then angled east in a steady climb. Beneath him the twelve-story monolith of the hospital shrank into insignificance, then vanished in a purple haze. In seconds the entire sloping clockface of the city melted into that haze and he was high on the edge of dawn, the heavens above a cold, dark indigo, the horizon below a garish slash of orange. Higher he soared, and at the rim of the world the sun lifted its blazing head. Light the color of apricots speared out in great fan-shaped rays, blinding him. Thrumming with a crazy mix of wonder, exhilaration, and fear, he banked away from the furnace of the sun and sliced still higher through the air. When the globe beneath him revealed its curving hip, he paused, hung there at what felt like the outer margin of the atmosphere, and look
ed down.
It's a goddam dream it has to be!
There was a sound then, a faint, keening whistle underlaid by an almost subaural rumble, like a synthesized bass note. The whistling sound heightened until it reached a whining, ultrasonic peak that made him want to clap his hands over his ears—
The jet roared by a hundred yards beneath him at what Peter estimated was at least Mach 2. There, and then gone, it had materialized out of the sun and then vanished into the maw of the west, the only signs of its passing a clean white contrail and a crackling sonic boom.
Feeling like a god, Peter gave chase. He dropped to the level of the vapor trail and followed it, skimming along its dissipating surface like a glory-bound soul on a celestial speedway. Powered by his will, he cranked an interior throttle and felt that hand on the crown of his head again, that compressible blister of resistance he'd had to overcome the first time. Thrusting relentlessly against it, he felt it give with an audible pop!
He was back in the corridor now, barely aware of the jet as he arrowed past it. Throttling down, he slowed to a hover and waited, unable to imagine how far or how fast he had traveled.
It was then that he spotted the string, slung over his shoulder and receding in the direction from which he had come. Slender as a thread, its slack length glowed with a faint blue light, reminding him of the fiberoptic filaments he'd read about in Scientific American, fine tendrils of glass along which light could be induced to travel.
Soulstring, he thought, recalling the title of a novel by a favorite author. That's my soulstring.
Jesus, this is real!
That whistling sound was back again.
Sick with excitement, Peter turned and prepared to meet it.
The jet came out of the explosive light of the sun like a dart hurled by a colossus. It bore down on him at breakneck speed, sunflares winking off its wing tips and tinted canopy. Matching its speed, Peter cut through the air above it, close enough to read the markings on its seamless frame. It was a Mirage 2000 in camouflage blues, packing twin Mantra 530s, sleek air-to-air missiles. It was a French fighter jet, part, Peter guessed, of the air show that had skipped to the cities south of Sudbury and would continue on a westward sweep for another few weeks until its completion in Vancouver.
As he shadowed the jet, Peter dug in his memory—a memory that lost almost nothing—and came up with the specs on this aircraft. Capable of Mach 2.3, the forty-eight-foot fighter jet had a range of just under a thousand miles and a service ceiling of 59,000 feet. He had studied aircraft the way a bird-watcher studied birds and could name most of them at a glance.
Ho-leeee fuck, we're really flyin' now!
Like some ghostly hitchhiker, Peter lowered himself onto the tinted canopy. Clasping its raised lip, he glued his face to the Plexiglas, barely noticing that, like a ghost, he cast no reflection. Beneath him the pilot's helmet gleamed like an ivory cue ball. A gogglelike visor the same smoky tint as the canopy concealed the upper half of the pilot's face, and an oxygen mask muzzled the rest. Bulky chute straps looped his shoulders, and between his spread knees a gloved hand clasped the joystick.
The old thrill was back with a vengeance. Wahooo! Peter howled in a childlike cry of joy. Ride 'em, cowboy!
The jet banked sharply to starboard, dropping Peter's stomach, and in his mind he begged the pilot to cut the bird loose, belly-roll, loop-the-loop, do something delinquent.
And then he did.
The jet rolled through a sudden 360 and Peter tumbled off. When he tried to regain control he found that he couldn't and now he was falling, twisting toward the misty curve of the earth like a jettisoned sack of potatoes. An updraft caught him and spun him around, tangling him in that blue thread of light, like a fish all snagged in its line. In a fit of panic, Peter saw that in places his soulstring was ragged, nearly worn through.
Twirling like a drill bit, Peter fell.
And in the great vacuum of his descent, he blacked out.
When he came to, he was back in his body, the sensation of free-fall still churning his guts. Dressed in a gaudy pink uniform, a cleaning lady stood hunched at the foot of his bed, the sound of the vacuum she was trailing a lot like the whine of a jet.
(dreamjustadreamjustastupidfuckingdrearm)
Starting as Peter's head came up off his pillow, the cleaning lady said good morning with a thick Italian accent, then resumed her labors.
"Gina," Peter said, for he knew all the staff by name, "open the curtains for me, will you?"
"Sure," Gina said, laying the hose aside and toeing the machine into silence. "It's a nice day outside, no?"
"Please," Peter said, the urgency of his tone making the cleaning lady stumble. "Hurry."
Gina swept the curtains open, flooding the room with morning light.
Peter craned his neck.
And there, high against a curving canopy of blue, was the spectral slash of a vapor trail, already dissipating.
Smiling, Peter thanked the woman, then dropped comfortably back to sleep.
When Sam sauntered in that evening with his book-loaded knapsack slung over his shoulder, he took one look at his brother and stopped dead in his tracks. There was something wrong, and although Sam could not immediately put a name to it, it struck him like a rush of poisoned air.
"What's up?" Peter said cheerfully. "You look as if you just stepped barefoot in a cow pie."
"I. . . uh. . .” Sam stammered—and then he had it: Peter was smiling. Not the forced congenial grin he sometimes managed but a huge, sparkling, face-splitting smile the likes of which Sam had last seen about eight years ago, on the day Peter's flight instructor handed him his pilot's license. Sam shrugged off his bad feeling—it was great to see his brother happy for a change—but a shred of it remained, like an itch just out of reach.
"You look great," he said as he drew up a chair.
"Feel great," Peter said, his smile widening.
For a clumsy moment Sam was at a loss, and he just sat there, staring. He'd been excited on his way over here from the library, where he'd spent the morning scanning the surprising volume of literature that was available on the out-of-body experience. The more he read, the more convinced he became that Peter had experienced just that. According to the literature, the OBE was generally accepted as the last stage of physical death, a sort of reluctant parting of essence and flesh. In the more legitimate works, large amounts of data had been amassed, individual case reports including statements made by patients who, through medical intervention, had been snatched back from death's very doorstep. What Sam found remarkable about these statements was their almost exact correlation with each other—and with what Peter had told him about his own near-death experience.
As with all things unusual, the OBE had its lunatic fringe, fire-eyed zealots who claimed they could leave their bodies at will, travel great distances at blurring speeds—attached the whole time to their bodies via an incredibly elastic thread—and return intact, refreshed and more intensely alive than the rest of us could even begin to comprehend.
But loony or not, how else could Sam explain it? His brother had been in the apartment. . . and their mother had sensed his presence. After reading about it, Sam had been eager to share with Peter some of the things he'd found out. . . but that smile. Somehow that smile had taken the edge off his excitement. Maybe he'd just leave the books in his knapsack and forget about the whole crazy thing.
Peter's head came off the pillow, the action as always making Sam think of a man buried to the neck in desert sand.
"Whatcha got in the sack, Jack?"
"I've been doing a little research," Sam said uneasily, thinking, not for the first time, that Peter seemed able to read his thoughts. He reached into the knapsack and withdrew the topmost book. "And I think I know what happened to you the other night."
"I do, too," Peter replied, still smiling. "And it happened again."
"No shit?"
"No shit, bud." He made a shrill whistling sound through
his teeth, jerking his head toward the window as he did so. "Last night. And it was un-fucking-real, if you'll pardon my French."
He related in detail the happenings of the night before, beginning with his voyeuristic encounter with Nurse Blane—which made Sam blush and Peter roar with laughter—then moving on to his flight at the rim of dawn. By the time he was done Sam had all but forgotten his earlier inkling of dread.
"And you saw the string?" Sam probed eagerly.
"Sure did, Sambo. But it was more like a thread, a fine, glowing blue thread. I even gave it a name: soulstring."
"Yeah," Sam agreed. "That really says it."
"So what about these books?"
Sam held up the first of them for his brother's inspection. It was a plain black paperback entitled The Projection of the Astral Body.
"Well," Sam began, unaware of the terrible Pandora's box he was about to help open, "these guys claim you can learn to do this at will."
NINETEEN
Will slammed the door of his Chevy pickup, hiked his jacket over his head, and ran across the parking lot to the gym entrance door. A cold October rain was falling, promising an early winter, and Will was glad he'd put the Buick up on blocks the weekend before. Weather like this was hell on the chrome.
He jerked the door open and slipped inside. The corridor was empty, but he could hear tinny music in the distance, and the echoey shouts of kids. He grinned. He hadn't been in a high school gymnasium in sixteen years. He let himself in through a door marked girls' entrance and took a seat in the stands. Kelly stood with her back to him on the opposite side of the gym, her fanny packed prettily into spandex tights, and Will felt a familiar tug of excitement. God, she looked good.
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