When Ann Marie found Dade upstairs, the Sheriff was there as well. He had apparently just shared the news about the death of the prisoner. Dade was still recovering from the interrogation the day earlier. He was barely able to pull himself up to his feet.
“I’m gonna kill that bastard,” he said, sounding groggy. “Right this second.”
The Sheriff stopped him, saying, “I don’t think you’re doing much killing in the shape you’re in.”
“I’ll kill that old man with one finger.”
“You’re being crazy, Dade,” argued the Sheriff. “This is Bernard Mengel.”
“What the hell happened?” Ann Marie finally asked.
“Honey,” said the Sheriff as he seemed to choose his words carefully. “Something bad happened here last night.” At that moment, he got a call. After he hung up, he told Dade, “He wants to talk. He’s waiting in the cafeteria.”
The Sheriff and Ann Marie followed Dade as he rushed to the cafeteria. Bernard was waiting for them, standing in perfect attention with his hands primed behind his back. A dozen corporate security officers in black helmets and kevlar armor formed a protective ring around the old man. When the soldiers saw Dade, they let their stun weapons flash in a show that was meant to keep any conflict from developing.
“Hello my son and my Dr. Bandini,” greeted Bernard like a man spotting a familiar face at a party.
Dade Harkenrider cocked his chin close to his chest and angled his eyes until they took over his stare. He went toward Bernard and, just as he was getting close to striking distance, he shifted his feet to the right and started slowly circling the old man.
Ann Marie kept her distance as two of the soldiers got in front of Dade and sparked their stun weapons.
“Please keep back, sir,” one of the men in black armor told him.
“Fine,” said Dade. “Bernard gets to enjoy a few more minutes of his awful life.” With the soldiers focused on him, he continued to slowly circle the old man.
“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, my boy!” Bernard said in a way that sounded distinctly like a taunt.
“You’re going to pay for what you did to that man.”
“You mean that common insurgent?” asked Bernard. “Of course, I’m not saying that I harmed him in any way. It’s a tragedy what he did to himself.”
“Did to himself?”
“The man wasn’t civilized. Obviously! A common thug. It’s just like you to get upset over someone who doesn’t matter.” Bernard then addressed Ann Marie directly, saying, “That master of yours can be quite sensitive. Don’t let the tough guy act fool you. He is as soft and tender as a little toddler.”
“I’m nobody’s master,” said Dade. “And I’m not too tender to squash your diseased brain in my bare hands.”
From behind his armored face shield, one of Bernard’s guards let out a timid-sounding warning for Dade to stay back. Harkenrider complied, relaxing his stance and resuming his predatory orbit.
Ann Marie did her best to stay back.
Bernard addressed her again, saying, “It’s a pity what’s happened to dear Dade, what he’s become. I did my best to mentor him, but we are who we are, in the end. After all, Ann Marie, your mentor is only human.”
“Shut your trap, you geriatric!” shouted Dade as though he had been severely offended by being called human.
“You see, Ann Marie,” Bernard went on, “Dade absolutely hates being called human.”
The two of them continued circling one another until something very strange happened. There was a loud snap like the crack of a whip. Suddenly Dade was standing right behind Bernard. He was about to grab the old man by the throat. There was another snap. Bernard had moved to where Dade was standing. The two of them had traded places in a flash.
The feat made the soldiers recoil in panic. “What in God’s green Earth just happened?” one of them asked. His commanding officer told him, “You were instructed that this would be weird. Now stay on mission!”
“Did you see that, Dr. Bandini?” Bernard asked Ann Marie like he was bragging out a magic trick. “Pretty impressive. Isn’t it?”
She didn’t answer him. What she had just seen had put her in a mild state of shock. Dade’s leap from the top of the building could have been cables or some sort of parachute that she somehow missed. However, seeing the two men trade places was more than her brain could explain away. She pushed her way out of the cafeteria doors, ran to her car and drove home to her mother.
...
Lori Bandini was talking on the phone when her daughter flew through the door of the apartment. Ann Marie was in a rush to tell her mom what had happened and just started talking. “Mom, you wouldn’t believe what I just saw. I think I just saw magic. Like real magic!”
“Hang on a second, baby. It’s Scotty back in Philly on the phone. He’s telling me the craziest story about the new bartender. Apparently the guy wears lacy lingerie under his work clothes. Weird, right?”
“What I saw is much crazier. I think I saw people teleport!”
“Yeah,” her mom said, cupping her hand over the phone. “These cellular phones are incredible nowadays.”
“No, mom! I mean teleport! Like instantaneously appearing somewhere else.”
Lori looked annoyed for a moment. “Sorry, Scotty,” she said to the man on the phone, “my lovely daughter was just telling me about something at work. I missed the last thing you said.”
“Oh forget it,” said Ann Marie. “Just tell Scotty hello for me. I’ll be in my room.”
She spent that night as an insomniac, tossing and turning and replaying the images of the day in her head. Had she hallucinated? Was she losing her mind the way so many young geniuses did? Had she really seen the impossible?
...
Late the following afternoon, just as the sky above Los Angeles was turning a fiery orange, Ann Marie found Dade looking out from the Asylum’s top deck. For once, he wasn’t tinkering with anything in the lab. He was just staring off at the city below. For once, she thought, he was doing something that a normal human being might. He didn’t need to turn around to know that she was there.
“You OK?” he asked her.
The sight of his teleportation had left her feeling like she had been struck by lightning. Before she could come up with a response, she just sort of shrugged her shoulders. “I guess so,” she said. “I can’t even imagine going to sleep ever again though.”
“You will eventually,” Dade said as he looked her over in a manner that seemed like he was worried.
“What I saw yesterday,” she started to ask, “that was magic, right?”
“What do you mean by magic?”
“Your jump from the top of the building was one thing,” she said, shaking her head. “But I know what I saw in the cafeteria.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw you and Bernard teleport. I know what I saw. I was up all night, replaying it all in my head. I know what I saw.”
Dade just looked back at her.
“I don’t hear you denying it,” she told him.
“Because I’m not going to lie to you, Ann Marie.”
It had been the first time she could remember that he used her first name. Something about the sound of it gave her some relief.
“Will you tell me how you did it?”
“The explanation won’t make any sense at this point. I’ll just say that it’s something that you can pick up after a while. It’s something about the experiments in the tank.”
She had many more questions. “How far can you go? Can you teleport all the way to Japan? Can you teleport through the earth?”
Dade stopped her, saying, “For some reason teleporting through things other than air is tricky. I’ve never figured it out and I don’t think Bernard has either. It requires something, a depth that we haven’t been able to get to. To teleport, you need to perfectly envision where you’re going. So, short distances
are simple. The easiest method is to form mirror images the way Bernard and I did in the cafeteria. It’s pretty hard to make happen the first time. Then again, that’s always the case with impossible things.”
She asked him how he jumped off the roof of the laboratory in his attack and how they had both walked away uninjured.
“Bernard and I are in a rather exclusive group with special knowledge, so to speak.”
“Then how did you fall so far without hurting yourself?”
“Seeing,” said Harkenrider. “I didn’t exercise any special power. I just use what I can see.” Ann Marie clearly didn’t understand, so Dade explained further. “I didn’t jump or fall. I climbed.”
“Climbed what?”
“The tendrils,” explained Dade. “The luminous filaments as they’re described by some shaman. They connect all life and all materials. They defy space. Thats why they’re hard to see. It’s the invisible fabric of everything. Only it’s not invisible if you look hard enough, if you can teach yourself to see.”
“How can I teach myself?”
The burden of the question showed up in Harkenrider’s face. It looked as though he was worried for her. After considering what to say for a moment, he turned his head and looked back toward the isolation tank in the laboratory. “The more time you spend on the other side, the clearer you can see them.”
“Can Bernard see them?”
“As well as I can, if not better because he has more experience. He and I were swinging around on them during our fight. That’s why it looked so strange to you.”
“What else can you do?”
Dade, who had been standing to her right shoulder, was suddenly standing at her left. Now he was back on the right. Now both. Now he is standing on the ground twenty floors below, waving. He was back at her right side as though nothing had changed.
Disoriented and confused at first, Ann Marie’s expression quickly changed to unabashed excitement. “You can teleport,” She said.
“It takes some learning.”
“So it’s not magic?”
“There is no such thing as magic, Ann Marie. Just lost knowledge.”
“So anyone can learn to do it?”
“Anyone who’s willing to learn more than they ever wanted to know and willing to endure the worst kind of fear. In other words, practically no one.”
Ann Marie clamped her eyes shut, took a deep breath and tried to clear her mind. “I’m trying to see them,” she said as though suddenly in the middle of a yoga session. “I’m trying.” Then she slowly drew her eyes open, fully expecting the luminous tendrils to suddenly fill the scene. After unsuccessfully staring off for a few seconds, she shouted, “Damn it! I can’t see anything.”
Dade Harkenrider started to giggle at her effort, saying, “If it was that easy, the American military would have figured it out years ago.”
...
A few days later, as the sun was going down, she took the elevator up for their nightly experiment. Dade was outside on the deck, looking out over the Pacific. A dozen baby DeathStalkers scurried around at his feet. The rodent-sized machines were combining their bodies into different shapes by linking to each other’s claws and tails. It seemed to be a lighthearted game for the robots. A few more were inside, engaged in a playful match of stalk and chase with the laboratory cats.
He realized she was there without turning around. “You came,” he said.
“I thought that was the plan.”
He turned and smiled in a way that put her more at ease. He said, “Tonight is going to be important.”
“Why?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” he answered. “But it’s something I can feel in the air. A buzzing. The cats are very sensitive in these matters and I can tell they feel the same thing.”
“Is it a good thing?”
“In my experience, probably not.”
They walked back into the lab with the baby DeathStalkers following Dade like ducklings. He already had the tank warming to body temperature in preparation for his voyage. The fume hood across the lab had been taken over by his synthesis apparatus. It looked like a massive highway overpass system of glass tubing, heaters and flasks.
“This stuff must be hard to make,” said Ann Marie, admiring the complexity of the setup. “Your yield must be pretty low.”
“Disaster,” he told her. “That’s one of the reasons your techniques are so important.”
At that point, Dade prepared to enter the tank. His body was covered in a plush gray robe labelled: Asylum Corporation. For once, he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses. He poured himself a seven-hundred-and-fifty milliliter beaker full of a thick white liquid. It looked like yogurt. He sucked the liquid down without tasting it.
“What’s in that stuff?” Ann Marie asked him.
“A specially engineered algae solution. It contains all the necessary vitamins, fats and protein.” Dade wiped his mouth and started to adjust the settings on the tank’s control panel.
“Don’t you ever eat, you know, food?”
“It’s all I’ve had for the last fifteen years,” he said. Then he connected sensor pads to his body to test his blood pressure and galvanic skin response.
“Why do you want to kill that Bernard guy so bad?”
Smiling with one corner of his mouth, he told her, “I guess I’m just a dangerous psychopath who randomly attacks innocent senior citizens.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Don’t trust him,” said Dade. “Don’t listen to a word he says, not because he’ll lie to you, but because he’ll tell you the truth.”
“I don’t understand.”
He climbed the ladder to the top of the tank and sat on the edge. He stopped and looked at her. Without his trademark black sunglasses, his eyes looked haunted by fear. “I’m going deep tonight,” he said. “It’s the only way to see.”
“See what?”
“Part of Bernard’s plan if I’m lucky.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I’ve been concentrating on Bernard since he arrived. I’ve been blocking out my thoughts and quieting my internal dialogue. I have to make my consciousness expand into Bernard’s.”
“What do I need to do?”
“Don’t help or assist me under any circumstances once the tank is closed,” Dade ordered.
“What if something goes wrong?”
“Just don’t let me out of the tank until I’m out of the trip.”
He let himself slide down into the warm, oxygen-rich liquid. When he saw her on the other side of the acrylic, he gave her a thumbs-up to lower and lock the lid. Dade injected himself and the tank dimmed to black the way it normally did. Ann Marie kept careful watch on his vital signs.
Everything looked normal until about twelve minutes in. At that point, Dade’s brainwaves flatlined and his heartbeat became dangerously weak. It triggered something in the tank’s computer system and the sequence started to abort.
Something was definitely wrong. As the walls of the tank started to clear, she could see Dade’s lifeless floating body. He looked deader than usual. Then, suddenly, his eyes sprang open. They were nothing but black orbs. The sight made Ann Marie jump back.
His body began to jerk and his heart rate climbed to a dangerous level. His eyes came back to life and they were filled with terror. He pounded on the acrylic, trying desperately to fight his way out.
Seeing him like that was agonizing for Ann Marie. She started looking everywhere for something to open the tank. She climbed to the top and opened the electrical panel near the lid. With her hands shaking, she found the wires to the motor that lifted it open. She ripped them out and reconnected them in a different configuration. The lid slowly came up.
Dade was still fighting to get out. She reached into the warm liquid and grabbed for his hands. When she got him out, he was shaking so hard that his slippery body was difficult to get ahold of
. Before she could help him down the ladder, he teleported across the lab onto the cot where he slept.
When she got over to him, his body was shaking like he had a bad fever. He threw both his hands over his heart like he was trying to stop someone from stabbing him in the chest. Then, suddenly, his body began to flash in and out in a strobe pattern. It was as if he was disappearing and reappearing. She put her hand on his forehead and the flashing stopped.
“That was scary,” he whispered.
“So don’t ever do it again.”
“I have to.”
He coughed some more and tucked his body into the fetal position. His eyes closed. He seemed to be slipping back into some kind of trance. Sounding very afraid, he started babbling to himself. He sounded like a little boy. “Please don’t hurt Ivy,” he said. “Please. Don’t hurt Ivy, Bernard. No. Please. Not Ivy.” The words were bringing him a great deal of pain.
“You OK, Dade?” Ann Marie asked as she knelt by the side of the bed. When he didn’t answer she asked, “Can I do anything? Can I help you?”
His trance had apparently taken him far away and he didn’t respond to her. He just kept mumbling something about someone called, Ivy.
Ann Marie climbed into the cot. Dade was still covered in slippery breathing liquid and it got all over her too. With him in a distant trance, she pressed herself into him as close as she could. Closing her eyes, she picked up his arm and brought it over her shoulders.
Chapter 7
Ivy, the Beautiful
Twenty-five years earlier, Bernard Mengel stared out of the tinted window of his black limousine. He was watching a little brunette girl, who was perhaps five or six years old. She was playing in a blue plastic wading pool that had been turned into a sandbox. The little girl stuck a yellow shovel into the sand. She scooped some up before letting it drizzle back into the box. She had silver dollar-sized pale blue eyes and hair as black as the feathers of a raven. The little girl seemed perfectly at home by herself in front of the small, one-story house. She was so absorbed by her imagination that she didn’t notice the stretch limo across the street.
Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) Page 10
