Iran Air, it turned out, did not allow its passengers to use their cell phones or access the Internet during flights. That was frustrating; Caitlin knew that for thirteen hours she would wonder what Ben meant by “real hazard.” Had Maanik tried to set herself on fire like Atash? Negotiations be damned: if Maanik had harmed herself beyond scraping her forearms, Mrs. Pawar wouldn’t have waited. The girl would already be in the hospital—she would at this moment be drugged into an overmedicated automaton, and that would be the end of the exploration into what was truly happening to her.
Hold on, Caitlin urged Maanik in her head. Hold on till I’m back.
Of course she didn’t believe Maanik would hear that, and yet the impulse did not seem so crazy after all she had experienced.
What if Vahin is right? If Maanik’s mind was open to this “transpersonal plane,” and Caitlin herself had some access to it as well, wasn’t it conceivable that a message could pass from her to Maanik? Vahin had speculated that Caitlin may have acquired access because she had placed herself in such close psychic proximity to the affected young adults.
“Vibrations,” he had said to her, pressing pamphlets and booklets into her hands before she left. “Each of us is like a tuning fork that does not stop. Like the tea, the soul vibrates and survives outside the body, outside of time. In life, we change pitch and resonate with each other, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in groups. Why should the soul be different?” He added in parting, “There are those of us who believe it is the purpose of all life to achieve a complete resonance—all of us as one.”
“Make me one with everything.” Caitlin found herself muttering the oft-mocked phrase of Eastern mystics.
“New-agey” was the expression that came to mind. Yet everything she had seen, the gestures and words, the shared symbol, the reactions of the animals, was exactly that: new-agey, mystical, quasireligious, fantastic. Choose the outré word that fit. But she could not disavow any of it, from the floating hair and fabric to the shock waves to the visions. Those were a part of that strange reality Vahin advocated. What made his explanation less valid than any other?
Caitlin mentally reviewed the signs along the road to this point.
The shared symbol drawn by both Gaelle and Maanik seemed a good place to begin. If Atash had been able to use his hands, might he have drawn it too? Caitlin still found the triangles made of crescents to be inexplicable. They were slightly Celtic yet not. They vaguely resembled a radioactive symbol—but that could be a time-biased comparison, looking back from the present instead of looking toward the present. If this symbol were really as old as a habitable Antarctica, perhaps it had been the unconscious inspiration for the modern symbol?
Habitable Antarctica. The thought had occurred to her so easily. She remembered the apparent map Maanik had drawn. When they reviewed its shape and topography, it linked closely to a map of Antarctica as though surveyed from the air. Could people have flown that long ago? Caitlin had seen ice in the vision with Atash—was that also Antarctica? Perhaps an ancient someone had traveled above it by balloon? She thought back to one of Jacob’s science experiments. All that would have required were thermal currents somehow directed into a big sheath of—what? Pelts? Leather?
Too heavy.
Animal tissue? In the past, whales had been harvested for nearly every part of their body. Thin tissue, sinew, skin—was that possible?
The word “fantastic” came back to her. Maybe she was making leaps—but nothing else came close to making sense.
Antarctica. A different time, a different climate. With people? Humans? A society, a civilization? What else could it be? There was a sophisticated language of words and gestures. She thought of all the stories and fables she had heard in her life, from Noah and the flood to the Greek myth of Icarus. Even scholars had always said there was probably a foundation to our most exotic tales.
The first thing she would do when she had Internet again would be to search for any cataclysms that had occurred at the South Pole over the millennia, right back to Pangaea if necessary. The patients had mentioned fire from the sky and something about a wave. There had to be some connection. Her mind might be arguing against it, but that’s what minds did. Her gut was telling her this was the right direction.
The plane banked left and Caitlin watched through her window as the Caspian Sea tilted back into view, sparkling in the late afternoon sun. She closed her eyes and recalled her conversation with Ben in the park in Turtle Bay. Her breath fluttered at the thought of him. She decided to talk to him, to ask to start over when the immediate crises subsided.
If they subsided.
She thought of poor Maanik wobbling through the hallways of a psych ward, drugged to oblivion. She contemplated the larger populace struggling thirty thousand feet below, constantly at war or at the mercy of an unstable climate and formidable geology. What if Vahin was correct? What if some ancient race was correct: that the vibration of souls, their continuation out of the body, was the way to truly survive? What if, in some ancient theology, there lay the common, long-lost origins of Valhalla and the Elysian Fields and Heaven?
The transpersonal plane.
Caitlin focused again. More than anything else, she wanted to communicate with Maanik, tell her I’m still with you, distance be damned. Vahin said they were connected. Could she send a thought to Maanik? How? What kind of wave could she make that would touch the girl?
She tried to relax her thoughts. She recalled the park, with Ben. Sunshine, unbuttoning their coats. Ben exuberantly describing the words he had deciphered from Maanik’s gibberish. “Fire,” of course, and “sky,” but also “water.”
Big water.
And then, suddenly, Caitlin had it. Atash had tried to form the superlative when she entered his hospital room—left hand angling away from the body, right hand crossing up the body on a diagonal. She didn’t remember the spoken word that went with it but she didn’t need to. The gesture had to be enough.
She closed her eyes and calmed herself as completely as if she were about to guide a client into hypnosis. She thought of Jack London first, the beagle barometer, remembered him sleeping and snoring. Then she thought of Maanik. She sifted through their moments together, remembered when Maanik had made a face for her, when she had seemed most like her normal teenage self. When she saw the girl clearly, when she felt the laugh they’d shared, Caitlin gently angled her left hand away from her torso and crossed her right hand up toward her left shoulder. Unexpectedly her lungs took a deep inhale and then exhaled—it felt as though she had pushed a physical weight away from her sternum, off her left shoulder. She kept her mind on Maanik and thought to her:
Ocean . . . big water . . . you and me together . . . hold on . . .
Suddenly Caitlin heard Maanik in her head, heard the girl say: “I will.”
Caitlin opened her eyes, shocked. She hadn’t imagined that voice. That had been real.
She looked around, at the quiet passengers in the plane, at the empty aisle seat beside her. Everything was normal—but not. She felt closer to Maanik here, now, than she did to the window beside her. In that moment, the familiar sights and sounds of life were no longer a reliable foundation. Like the sea far below, they were just the surface of something greater. Perhaps that was the comprehensive explanation.
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, spac
e . . . 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 shelf 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.
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