Chill Of Fear tbscus-8

by Кей Хупер

  "That's the plan. If anyone can do it, John can."

  "I'll say. And Maggie's doing okay?"

  "She's flourishing. John's been very good for her."

  "She's been great for him as well. Twenty years I tried to convince him psychic abilities were real, and she manages it in a week or two."

  "Sometimes," Beau said, "falling in love removes the blinders from our eyes."

  "Very like a fortune cookie."

  Beau smiled, but kept his gaze on his canvas.

  Quentin prowled a while longer, then said, "You're very plugged in to the universe, right?"

  "According to Maggie."

  "Okay, then. Without providing a fateful shortcut for me, can you at least tell me if I'm on the right track in how I'm handling things with Diana?"

  "Are you following your instincts?"

  "Yeah."

  "Then I'd guess you're on the right track." Beau paused, then added casually, "But you might want to open up your focus a bit to include more than Diana."

  Quentin stopped prowling to stare at the other man. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that right now you have a kind of tunnel vision." Beau stepped back from his canvas, set his palette down on a worktable nearby, and began cleaning his brush. "Focus on a single element, and you could miss other equally important elements. If you hadn't encountered Diana, what would you be doing right now?"

  "With Cullen Ruppe unavailable today, I'd probably be... trying to get permission to go through boxes of old paperwork I know The Lodge has in storage rooms and in the basement. Because I don't have any legal authority to examine something ruled not relevant to an old crime, I've never been able to get access to stored employee records, the original blueprints of the buildings, and whatever else is down there."

  "Maybe it's time to ask again."

  After a moment, Quentin said, "Maybe it is."

  Beau said, "I'm told the current manager of The Lodge just got the job last fall. Have you met her?"

  "Not if she started last fall."

  "She might be more open-minded than the other managers were. More apt to grant a reasonable request to look through old paperwork."

  "You're about as subtle as a flagpole, Beau."

  "Just making a suggestion."

  "But not offering a shortcut?"

  "No. It's a path you would have followed on your own."

  With considerable feeling, Quentin said, "Once, just once, I'd like at least one member of the unit to give me a straight answer."

  Beau's eyebrows rose. "That was a straight answer."

  "Jesus." Quentin started toward the door, then paused and frowned at the other man. "My instincts are telling me to give Diana a little time to think about things. But not a lot of time. From what she told me earlier, her abilities are strong. Strong enough to scare the hell out of her. Maybe strong enough that they'll be difficult for her to control even once she accepts their reality. And I don't know as much as I wish I knew about mediums."

  "Neither do I. But like the rest of us, they're all different in most respects. Different strengths and weaknesses. No hard-and-fast rules, I gather."

  Steadily, Quentin said, "I think she may have the ability not only to open a door into the spirit dimension, but to pass through it herself."

  "That," Beau said, "has got to be dangerous."

  "Yeah, I don't have much doubt about that. I'm afraid if I'm not careful, I could lose her. I think maybe I need some expert advice."

  "I think maybe you do. Miranda raised a medium, I understand?"

  "Her sister, yeah. And very successfully; Bonnie's one of the most well-adjusted psychics I've ever met."

  "Say hello for me," Beau said.

  Diana hid out in her cottage for most of the afternoon, but by the time the sun began to slip behind the mountains, she was too restless to stay put any longer. She picked up her tote bag, with the sketches of Quentin and Missy still inside, hesitated at the door, and then somewhat defiantly locked it behind her.

  Quentin had been right earlier, and she'd had to have her key-card redone.

  Diana had overheard one of the doctors talking to her father back during her teenage years when it had been so bad. He'd been talking about the "stronger than normal" electrical impulses her brain had produced during an EEC Other tests had also shown the "abnormality."

  Diana still winced when she remembered how she'd felt hearing that.

  Abnormal. None of the psychiatrists or psychologists had ever used that word. But that doctor, cool and sure of himself, had used it with utter certainty.

  She was abnormal. There was something wrong with her.

  Unless... there was nothing wrong with her.

  Psychic? It was a possibility she had, literally, never considered. It had never crossed her mind that there could be anything so beyond her understanding at the root of her problems.

  And, surely, and despite what Quentin had said, someone in all these years would have offered the suggestion if it had been possible. Wouldn't they? All the doctors and therapists, all the experts her father had taken her to see for most of her life, they couldn't all have been wrong, could they?

  Could they?

  Diana wandered away from The Lodge, in the direction of the Formal Garden. Though she didn't consciously think about it, the neat rows of box hedges, the symmetrical planter beds bordered by smoothly raked paths, the classical fountains, all made her feel somewhat soothed. It was all so... orderly.

  Unlike her mind. Thoughts skittered through it, half formed, just bits and pieces. She couldn't concentrate at all, couldn't focus on anything except the haunting question of whether twenty-five years of her life had been virtually wasted in a futile search for a "cure" that had never existed.

  Because she had never been ill.

  Sitting down on an iron bench near a beautiful three-tier fountain, she considered and then discarded the impulse to pull out the sketchpad and draw something. Instead, she stared at the fountain, trying and failing to put the question out of her mind.

  "Hello."

  Startled, Diana saw a little boy standing only a few feet away. He was perhaps eight years old, an angelic child with fair hair and big brown eyes.

  "Hi," she said.

  "I'm sorry you're upset."

  Diana forced a smile, hoping she hadn't been wearing the sort of expression that gave children nightmares. "I'm just having a bad day, that's all."

  He nodded, solemn, then said, "My name is Jeremy. Jeremy Grant."

  "Hi, Jeremy. I'm Diana." She hadn't been around kids much and felt a bit awkward with this one. "Where are your parents?"

  He gestured vaguely toward the main building of The Lodge. "Back there. Can I show you something?"

  "Show me what?"

  "A place." He tilted his head slightly to one side, still solemn. "Sort of a secret."

  She wanted to ask him why he'd want to show his secret place to a stranger, but instead said, "It'll be getting dark soon, you know."

  "I know. We have time. It isn't far."

  "Okay, sure." Anything beat sitting there while her mind chased itself in useless circles, she thought. "Lead the way." She got up and followed as Jeremy turned and began walking along the gravel path toward the far end of the Formal Garden.

  Diana thought idly that if this child wanted to go beyond the gardens, she'd protest. The sun had set behind the mountains now, and there was a growing chill in the air. It would be dark in less than an hour. And she had no intention of being responsible for someone's child, not even on a good day.

  Even as she thought that, she realized that Jeremy had paused beside one of the raised planting beds to allow her to catch up, and when she did, reached confidingly for her hand.

  "It's just over here," he told her.

  Diana allowed herself to be guided down another path to where the Formal Garden intersected the English Garden. This area was filled with riotous blooms on shrubs and plants, the paths wound leisurely among them, and it p
ossessed a more natural, less manicured feeling than the other gardens.

  "Jeremy—"

  "This way." He led her toward one corner where the landscapers had apparently decided to allow an existing granite rock formation to become part of the garden. Several large boulders jutted up from a bed of smaller rocks and gravel, softened only by moss and a very few tenacious flowers growing in the stony area.

  "They were going to put in a waterfall," Jeremy said. "Changed their minds, I guess. The gardeners never dig here."

  "No wonder, with so much rock," Diana said. "Is this what you wanted me to see?"

  "Around to the side," Jeremy said. "See that rock with all the moss near the bottom? Look behind that."

  Suddenly suspicious, Diana said, "Nothing's going to jump out at me, is it, Jeremy? A frog, or some kind of bug? Because I don't like those."

  He smiled sweetly. "No, I promise. No frog or bug. Something you need to see." He released her hand. "Just look behind the rock."

  Diana looked at him for a moment longer and then, still wary, picked her way carefully among the rocks until she could see behind the one the child had indicated. At first, she had no idea what it was she was supposed to see. More rocks, looked like, more grayish granite, most of them jagged except for a piece that was paler and smoother, worn by a river somewhere, she supposed.

  "Jeremy, what—" She looked back over her shoulder, surprised not to see him there. She turned completely around, gazing all around the area, but saw no sign of him. "Fast little kid," she muttered, trying to figure out how he had moved so quickly and so silently.

  She looked back down at the rocky ground at her feet, more warily sure now that some nasty surprise lay in store for her if she poked around here. Even so, she found her gaze fixed on the rounder, smoother stone, and hesitated only an instant before crouching to touch it.

  It didn't really feel like a rock, she thought. When she tried to move it, the gravelly soil imprisoning the lower part of it gave it up easily. And it wasn't until she turned it slightly that she realized in horror what it was.

  It fell from her nerveless fingers, clattering against the stone, and came to rest so that the empty eye sockets stared up at her and small white teeth seemed to grin.

  The skull of a child.

  "Are you sure?" Bishop asked.

  "As sure as I can be," Quentin replied. "She only told me as much as she did because it freaked her out and her guard was down. God knows if she'll talk to me about it again. All I know is what it sounded like to me."

  "And she was touching your hand? When she said she was alone on the veranda except for you and Missy?"

  "Yeah. Said there were flashes, like a strobe, and that's when she saw us. Said something about me being there only because she was touching me, keeping me partway there. In the — what did she call it? — the gray time in between, I think she said, she was completely alone out there. Didn't see anybody else, including me. Or Missy."

  "You weren't aware of anything paranormal?"

  "Nothing I saw or sensed." Quentin leaned back against the headboard of his bed, the cell phone to his ear. "But I could tell something was going on with her. She was pale, her eyes were fixed and dilated, and her hand was like ice. But the storm was about to break, and we both know storms scramble all my senses as often as not. I'm either blocked or really distracted."

  "Obviously they don't block Diana."

  "No. If anything, I'd say they affect her strongly the other way. Isn't Hollis like that too?" he asked, naming the unit's only medium.

  "Yes. Much more apt to sense spiritual energy, and her spider sense is intensified as well. She says it's like all her nerve endings are raw and exposed."

  "That can't be fun," Quentin noted.

  "She's still learning to cope with all her abilities, so, no, not fun. And it must have been terrifying for Diana."

  "I'll say. She's clearly a medium, and a strong one. Probably how she was able to draw that sketch of Missy. She doesn't know the first thing about sorting through psychic impressions, so to her it's all a jumble. What she feels, what she thinks, what she senses. Hell, probably what she dreams as well. Pretty much a state of constant confusion. And all the doctors and meds and therapy over the years have only made things worse for her."

  Bishop was silent for a moment, then said slowly, "Quentin, you do realize that virtually all psychics with a background and condition similar to Diana's never learn to incorporate their abilities into their lives and function normally?"

  "Those we know about so far, yeah. But she's strong, Bishop. Really strong. If I can just get through to her, I know I can help her."

  "I just don't want you to be... disappointed... if you aren't successful. Talented as they may be, some psychics really are beyond our ability to help."

  "Not Diana."

  Accepting the other man's determination, Bishop said, "All right. Then, judging by what you've told us, probably the most important thing is for you to keep her grounded. Literally."

  "What do you mean?"

  "She told you that she was able to see you and Missy at the same time out on the veranda because she was touching you, keeping you partway there. Right?"

  "Yeah. But she can't possibly understand how her abilities work, not when all the doctors have spent a lifetime convincing her she's simply crazy."

  "I'm sure that's true — consciously. But we know our abilities come with instincts, and it's likely that some part of her, however deeply buried, does understand how they work. If she really was shaken off her guard when she told you about this, then it's very possible that she told you the absolute truth. She was able to see you when that psychic door was open because she was touching you. You were, in a very real sense, anchoring her on our side of the doorway. That could also explain the strobelike flashes; because you were anchoring her, she wasn't able to get a complete fix on the other side."

  Quentin digested that, then asked slowly, "So she needs an anchor? A lifeline?"

  Miranda, also on the speaker phone in Bishop's office, spoke up then to say, "Most mediums we've encountered don't; they're able to exert enough control to... stand back, in a sense, when they open that door. To look through, but not travel through. To keep themselves safely on their own side. But a medium like Diana, untrained and at the mercy of her own powerful abilities, may well be unable to do that. Without an anchor."

  "So... what would happen? Worst-case scenario, if she were to cross over psychically, pass through that doorway she opened, without an anchor on this side, what would happen?"

  "What mediums do," Bishop said, "leaves them wide open to spiritual energy, and we know a great deal of that energy is negative. Anger, grief, loss, regret, hate. Even a strong medium with good control is vulnerable to those destructive energies; a medium with strong abilities but lacking control could easily find themselves yanked into that other dimension we've theorized but can't prove exists."

  "It's a miracle that hasn't already happened to Diana," Quentin said.

  "How do you know it hasn't?"

  That surprised Quentin. "Could it have?"

  "Easily. If she has a history of blackouts, especially. Judging by what she said to you, she recognized that gray time between the flashes well enough to have given it a name. Which means she's been there before, probably many times over the years."

  Quentin gave himself a mental kick for having missed that. "Without an anchor?"

  "Her instincts could be good enough to have pulled her back to our side eventually. Find out whether she's experienced blackouts. If she has, and if they've increased in intensity or duration over the years, then Diana may be reaching a point in her psychic development when an anchor will become necessary for her own safety. At least unless or until she learns how to exert more control."

  Quentin stared across his pleasant room, not seeing any of it. "And without an anchor, one of these visits to that gray time would be... permanent? She wouldn't be able to come back?"

  "It's
possible, Quentin. We don't know for sure. We've encountered psychics so damaged they were catatonic, beyond anyone's reach. Those we could read at all were... a blank slate. Empty. Were they the physical shells of mediums psychically trapped on the other side? We don't know. Could Diana suffer that fate? We don't know."

  Quentin drew a breath and released it slowly. "You're a comforting bastard today."

  "Sorry."

  He sighed. "You two knew Diana would be here now. But you didn't set it up so she would be?"

  "No," Bishop replied. "Her doctor had already signed her up for the artistic workshop to be held this spring. All we did was place Beau as the instructor."

  "And have him suggest The Lodge as a setting?"

  "Yes."

  "To help her?"

  "To help both of you."

  "Wait a minute," Quentin said, realizing. "How did you even know about Diana? To know that her doctor had signed her up for the workshop, you had to be — what? — watching her?"

  There was a brief silence, and then Bishop said, "It's taken years to build the unit, Quentin, you know that. And you know that I spent a great deal of time in the early days checking out various reports of psychics and paranormal events."

  "Which was it, with Diana?"

  "I had a source in a major psychiatric research hospital in the Northeast. He told me about Diana. Years ago."

  "I gather you never tried to recruit her."

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Because she was so heavily medicated at the time it would have been useless and potentially harmful."

  "But you kept her on your watch list."

  "Yes."

  "Okay." Quentin was grappling with yet another puzzle. "But why were you so sure she needed to be here? Is she connected to The Lodge? To what happened here twenty-five years ago?"

  "You tell me."

  "Bishop."

  "I'm not trying to be deliberately obscure, Quentin. We don't know what the connection is, only that one exists. You and Diana are both meant to be there, now. Beyond that, there isn't much we can tell you."

  "Has it ever occurred to you," Quentin said politely, "that one day one of us might just get really pissed off about your chess playing?"