A Vision of Fire

by Gillian Anderson

  Tiki figures, she recalled with a jolt. They had large mouths and eyes very similar to this. She whipped out her phone; took a photo of her drawing, wincing from the bright flash; and texted it to Ben with a message: I saw this in connection with Gaelle. Long story. Polynesian influence?

  Then Caitlin did what she had previously avoided. She walked herself through the trip from the time she got off the plane, making detailed notes on everything that she could remember, without gloss, without explanation, and with only momentary hesitation when she reached her experience of the force that had thrown Gaelle against the wall. What could she even call it—energy? The Vodou push? She wondered if an electrical force could possibly account for it. It was worth researching later. She wrote until her hand cramped, until she was done. Folding the pages carefully, she numbered them in case they fell, then tucked them away before once again attempting sleep. Her mind would gather strength; it would not feed her dream demon, not if she could help it. She turned off the light.

  Her last thought was of something she’d seen through the window of the Land Rover heading back to Port-au-Prince—a patch of new trees planted on one of the mountainsides. The government had recently announced it was going to replant Haiti’s decimated forests. Caitlin hoped that the madame and her son would see it on their way back to the city and trust that fumbling, faulty human beings did sometimes create solutions.

  • • •

  Caitlin arrived home at two in the morning but her father was awake to open the door, allowing her to walk into a bright kitchen and a hug. She dropped her bag on the kitchen table and sat down.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “Fine, fine,” Joe said. “A little quiet, maybe.”

  “When?”

  “Earlier tonight,” he said. “He just kind of stared out the window for, oh, two minutes or so. I left him. He snapped out of it.”

  Caitlin felt a shiver. Two minutes. That’s about how long she was in her bizarre trance.

  Her father chuckled. “I’ll tell you, though. He crowed like Peter Pan when he got me to eat kale.”

  Caitlin returned to the moment. “Eat it and like it?”

  Joe grinned. “It was better than I expected. Don’t tell your mother.”

  Caitlin chuckled. She opened her bag and sorted through it, separating items she would leave in the bag and items to put away.

  “Cai, why don’t you unpack in the morning? You look like you need as much sleep as you can get.”

  She shook her head and kept sorting.

  “How did things go down there?” he asked.

  She stopped, looked at him sideways. “Dad, what’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you? Something that didn’t have an explanation.”

  “Hunh.” He sat back and thought, staring around the room much like Caitlin did when she needed to think. He was a tall, broad-­shouldered man with close-set Irish blue eyes and a sort of permanent youthfulness. “Well,” he said, “to be honest, it was you.”

  Caitlin stared at him in surprise.

  “You had your own personality from the day you were born,” he went on. “Well, maybe the day after you were born. You were always such a watcher, big eyes studying everything, and with very little to say.”

  “Mom said I was always quiet.”

  “Quiet but not—what—not drowsy or dull. You were always alert. I could see something in your eyes. To your point, the question you asked, I don’t know where souls come from but I know they exist. I saw yours.”

  Caitlin felt tears in her eyes, the tears that had refused to come before.

  Her father placed a hand on her shoulder. “What’s on your mind? Did Haiti get to you?”

  Caitlin shook her head. He stepped back. He knew not to pry, and she was relieved when he changed the subject.

  “I remember you loved ghost stories when you were a kid,” he said. “You read every one you could get your hands on. I always wondered whether you’d seen one.”

  Caitlin laughed. “Really? I remember the mythology books, Edith Hamilton. Oh, and Nancy Drew and the haunted lighthouse or farmhouse or something like that.”

  “Oh sure. We stopped letting you read them when you had nightmares.”

  She turned back toward him. “I had nightmares?”

  “Normal kid stuff,” he said. “That’s what the doctor told us. We ended up giving all the books away and they stopped.”

  It was Caitlin’s turn to say, “Hunh.” She placed her papers on the “to put away” stack. Her drawing of the face was on top and Joe picked it up to look at it. He laughed.

  “Where in the hell did you see this?” he asked.

  “Do you recognize it? I think it’s some kind of Polynesian tiki figure.”

  He grinned. “It’s not often that I get to tell you you’re wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He patted her hand and held up the drawing. “This is from your ancient past, kiddo.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Flora Davies, the forty-year-old chairwoman of the Group, was locking the airtight door of their basement on Ninth Street. The founder of the Group, Otis Davies, had purchased this grand mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue early in the twentieth century. Named the Global Explorers’ Club, ostensibly it was a home for travelers who came to the city and needed a place to rest before leaving. Here they could relax among fellow adventurers, swap tales, study maps and rare books in the library, or leave treasures they had found to be collected at some future date. Treasures that the Group examined thoroughly. Statues, vases, tablets, and other finds that might have writing or images, carvings, or paintings that fit their particular interests served the Group’s highly secret need. It had proved a worthwhile arrangement. All the results of the Group’s efforts, previously scattered throughout the world in bank vaults and secret warehouses, were now consolidated in this basement.

  Flora emerged from the side of the building and walked up the steps to the quiet street. She was heading to her apartment with the intention of getting some long-overdue sleep before Mikel arrived with his latest artifact from the Falklands. Other members would be arriving within hours to study it, and there would be much to do. Each new find was a key, and this particular key could well be the one that exponentially expanded what they knew, confirmed what they suspected, and ultimately narrowed their ancient search.

  At this moment, however, Davies’s mind was not on the artifact. She stood at the top of the steps that led from the well of the basement door to street level and looked south toward the park. Something was wrong. She heard voices in the park, which was not unusual even at this hour, and dogs barking, which was also not uncommon. What she could not understand was why she didn’t see the towering white marble arch that was built to celebrate the centenary of George Washington’s inauguration as president. It was gone.

  At a fast clip she walked toward the park where the Washington Square Arch used to be. As she neared it she realized she was wrong; the arch was there. Only it wasn’t white. And it wasn’t marble.

  Through the center of the arch she saw a dozen or so students backed well away, standing by the fountain toward the south. They were looking, pointing, taking photos and cell phone videos—not that they would convey the real-time creepiness of a nearly eighty-foot structure covered bottom to top with rats.

  When Davies realized what they were she stopped dead in her tracks and gasped. There must have been hundreds, even thousands. She had never seen, never heard of anything like this. Her first thought after her brain unfroze was that it was some kind of stunt, something concocted for a reality show or a guerilla cinema project by film school students.

  That has to be it. They couldn’t be real, could they?

  Suddenly spots of white appeared beneath the undulating carpet. First small and then larger, unevenly shaped patches. The students on the ot
her side began to scream and as Davies started to realize that the rats were leaving their perch in great heaving swaths, someone jokingly cried, “Stampede!” The creatures raced in all directions, with one tidal wave of them rolling unswervingly toward her. A charge of dark gray fur pushed down the center of Fifth Avenue and along both sidewalks. She stood transfixed, not so much with fear or revulsion—though she felt both as the rats rushed over her feet—but because the rats were real, there were no cameras, and though her heart was racing, her mind was working harder still, trying to figure out what on earth was going on.

  She turned protectively toward the club and that was when the real horror struck.

  The concrete recess outside the basement door was overflowing with pile upon pile of the surging vermin. Were they trying to get in the door? They were squealing, scratching, and tearing at each other to get higher still as they formed a roiling triangle in the doorway. Under the streetlight she could see tufts of fur floating upward and the occasional streak of blood. Those that could not get into that small area flowed into the garden that fronted the structure. All the rats that couldn’t fit in the stairwell were facing in one direction, aligned as much as possible to the north and south.

  Davies got as close as she could without making further contact. With shaking fingers she retrieved her cell phone from her shoulder bag and began shooting video. The rats’ activity was inexplicable indeed, but what challenged and distracted her was that this behavior was not entirely without precedent.

  As lights flicked on in surrounding apartments, people rising to check out the shouts coming from the park and the strange thumping and scratching taking place right outside their doors, Davies switched off her video and stepped into the shadows.

  She thought back to the call she had received from Mikel when he landed in Montevideo. The field agent had mentioned something strange—a flock of albatrosses that had flown directly at the plane from the north.

  Davies put her cell phone away and walked up the vast stone steps to the front door of the Global Explorers’ Club. There would be no sleep tonight.

  CHAPTER 18

  Under orders from Joseph P. O’Hara, Caitlin was allowed to send exactly one e-mail about the drawing before she went to bed.

  “That’s it, little lady,” he’d said in a voice she recognized from those old, old days when he let her make a phone call or have a Scooter Pie before retiring.

  She had to tell Ben, and she had to tell him now; it couldn’t wait. Caitlin took her tablet into the bedroom, sat cross-legged against the headboard, prepared an e-mail with attached notes from her trip and a photo of Gaelle’s sketch, then wrote:

  You might think I’m crazy but forget Polynesia. That’s not what I drew. Dad recognized it: a Viking longship. The teeth are either circular shields on the hull or people sitting inside it; the eyes are the tall, curved carvings at the prow and stern. He’s been dabbling in genealogy and our Irish roots are all mixed in with Scottish and Norse. He hit a few museum collections online and he saw a brooch design very similar to this. Gaelle sketched a symbol too—see the jpeg—that seems Celtic to me. Could the ship be connected to Gaelle’s almost drowning? I know that sounds nuts and you’re probably too busy to meet but call if you can tomorrow. I mean today. Tuesday. Thanks. —C xo

  Caitlin set the tablet on the floor and crashed. Her mind and energy and body had all hit a wall and she had no trouble sleeping through the night.

  She awoke feeling rested but restless, with a readiness to prowl through this mystery. Her father dropped Jacob off at school on his way out of the city and Caitlin looked over her work schedule. There was nothing until noon, after which the day was packed. To her surprise, Ben had not only called early and left a message but had time to meet. She called him back as soon as her “lads” were gone.

  He picked up on the first ring.

  “Hey, Cai.”

  “That’s not good news, is it? That you have free time?” She didn’t really have to ask; his solemn voice said it all.

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “The highest-level diplomats haven’t come back to the table. They’ve sent their lower-level people—trusted staff, essentially—to sort of act as placeholders. They can’t say much so they’re taking a lot of breaks.”

  “So the world is closer to the brink?”

  “I wouldn’t say closer,” Ben replied. “More like the cliff could give out with just one good sneeze. I’ll tell you more in person,” he said cautiously. “So please, let’s talk about something we can actually work out.”

  “Roger that, and I have to say I’m really glad you can meet.”

  Ben laughed, somewhat wryly. “Is that a crisis in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

  “Both.” Caitlin laughed and said good-bye.

  She slugged down some coffee her father had made and headed out. It was one of those blessedly mild days that late fall in New York sometimes delivered. Caitlin appreciated the transition from the heat of Haiti so she texted Ben suggesting they walk. He readily agreed.

  Sitting in the cab for the short ride over, she saw the already infamous “Rat Pack” video on the backseat monitor. It was creepy, and the speculation was that Con Ed’s working underground replacing cables had caused the rodents to leave their “homes.” What was even creepier was the army of pest control personnel descending on stately Fifth Avenue, bagging dead rats and setting traps.

  Caitlin met Ben with a warm hug that momentarily pushed his long, drawn expression into something like a smile. They strolled north from the United Nations through the small park in Turtle Bay. The sunlight glittered on the East River and they unbuttoned their coats.

  “Anything new with Maanik?” Caitlin asked.

  “She had a small incident,” he said. “Hansa found her talking to the dog in the middle of the night. What was strange was that he seemed to be listening. When Hansa tried to get her back to bed, Maanik started sobbing and flailing a little. But your cue worked.”

  “How are her parents doing?”

  “I didn’t speak with Hansa but the ambassador’s emotional state has shifted. He’s less anxious but he seems more . . . ‘sad’ is the only word that fits. A part of it has to be the sense that he’s failing the peace process, but I also think he feels as though he’s failing his daughter. He said something about having to take some kind of action before she’s stuck like this for life. I told him you were making progress.” Ben looked at her. “Are you?”

  “Maybe. I’ve got so much to share with you—”

  Ben put a hand on her arm. “Before we get to that, I . . .”

  Caitlin sensed he was struggling with something and put a warm hand on top of his.

  “I feel guilty for putting this on you.” Ben looked at the pavement.

  “Go ahead. Seriously. You know I’ll keep it confidential.”

  “Okay. There is a rumor—and I want to stress that it is a rumor—that some countries are considering shutting down their embassies in India and Pakistan and flying out their employees. Countries that include us, the UK, and Japan.”

  “Oh my god,” said Caitlin.

  “God?” Ben said. “You see God in this? Anywhere?”

  Caitlin didn’t answer. The question made her think of her vision, of millennia of prophets and shamans and mystics who had visions, of the ivory-tower debates about the difficulty of distinguishing between profound faith and dementia. She got back on topic. “The cliff you talked about on the phone. It’s that close to crumbling?”

  “It might be a brinksmanship maneuver, but those have a catastrophic tendency to take on a life of their own. It could be politicos testing the water to see how everyone reacts, whether the Indian and Pakistani delegates will come back to the table given the right impetus.” He exhaled and rubbed the bone below his ear. “I just don’t know.”

  “What do you think?” />
  He hesitated. “I think it’s a ploy.”

  “Is that what you would say to me anyway, to keep me from worrying?”

  “No, Caitlin. I would never play you.”

  “Okay.” She pressed his hand again. “You know those Magritte umbrellas that look black to everyone else but underneath they’re blue sky and puffy white clouds? We’re going to stand under one of those. Because if I don’t ignore what you just told me, I won’t be able to focus.”

  He nodded and half-smiled. “I just felt like one of your patients getting a safe-haven visual.”

  “You were.” She half-smiled back, then jumped into a description of her trip, ending with the conversation with her father. “So, his crazy idea that my drawing invokes the Vikings—when I say it out loud it seems to lose some weight but, Ben, he was one hundred percent certain.”

  “It’s not so crazy,” Ben said. “My linguistic programs broke down the snatches of language we have and I did some comparing. Part of what came out of Maanik’s mouth seems to be rooted in Old Norse.”

  Caitlin stopped and gaped at him. Finally, at least some of the pieces were coming together. She allowed herself a big smile.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” said Ben. “There’s a strong strand of Mongolian as well.”

  “Oh. But Mongolian and Norse had no connection, at least not that I know of.”

  He shook his head and laughed. “None at all. Nor the snippets of Japanese. This kind of discovery could make history in certain circles. Last night, when I confirmed all those languages, was the most exciting night of my life. Thank you, Cai. You made it happen.”

  “What every woman loves to hear!” She grinned and realized she was flirting. She blamed it on his infectious enthusiasm and switched back to professionalism: “Can you give me specifics?”

  He spoke slowly and deliberately to make his point. “This hybrid language should not exist, but it does. And it makes sense. The hand gestures are superlatives but they apply to nouns as well as adjectives. So for example, if I say ‘hergha’ ”—he rolled the r and sort of hacked out the second syllable—“it means ‘fire.’ But if I say it while doing this”—he made a circle with his hand, the palm facing his torso, then pushed it to the side exactly as Maanik and Gaelle had both done at different points—“it means ‘the biggest fire,’ a conflagration.”