by J. Thorn
“Can we trust her?” Dipes said. Isaac put a hand of encouragement on his shoulder.
“She’s promised not to shrink us,” Freeman said. “She just wants to help. In the real way, not the way that makes her feel better about herself.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Starlene said. “So, what’s going to happen that we need to be scared of?”
Dipes looked at Freeman. “Ghosts.”
Isaac said, “You guys keep going on about ghosts. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Believe it,” Starlene said. “What ghosts in particular are you talking about, Edmund?”
“Edmund?” Isaac said, looking at Dipes. “That’s a pretty cool name. Like in a British book or something. Why didn’t you tell us?”
He shrugged. “I like ‘Dipes’ better, ‘cause Edmund’s what my folks called me.”
“What ghost did you see?” Starlene repeated.
Dipes pointed a finger at Freeman’s chest. “Yours.”
“Great,” Freeman said. “Well, maybe you saw only one kind of future, and there’s bound to be a gazillion different futures.”
Isaac’s dark complexion grew a shade paler. “Sure. Like opening doors on a video game. Depending on which room you go in, different stuff happens.”
“We better go in one of them, and soon,” Starlene said. She went to the stairwell door and began trying keys. “They’ll be after us.”
“Are you scared?” Dipes asked Freeman.
“About maybe dying? Nah. There are way worse things than that.”
“Like what?”
Freeman didn’t want to dwell on it. For one thing, if he died, that meant he’d have to see Mom again. For another, he didn’t plan on dying. Even Clint Eastwood managed to make it to the final credits nine times out of ten.
Except in those movies where Clint was the Defender of the Weak, Protector of the Innocent. Then it was practically a hero’s requirement to take one for the team.
He looked at Starlene’s face. Tears made twin lines down her cheeks.
Damn. She must really sort of like me a little bit.
“It’s worse to live like you’re waiting for second chances,” Freeman finally said. “That’s worse than being dead.”
Starlene found the right key and swung the door open. She wiped her nose and regained her composure.
“You guys better stay here,” Freeman said.
“No way,” Isaac said. “They’re going to pick us off one by one if we don’t do something.”
“Yeah,” Dipes said. “I saw a future where this place was empty. All the kids gone. Except for the ones in the basement.”
“The basement?”
“Yeah. Where the ghosts live.”
Freeman followed Starlene down the dark stairs.
Isaac took Dipes’ hand and came after them. “So we better stick together. Plus, this may be my only chance to see a real live ghost.”
“Just hope you’re not looking in a mirror at the time,” Freeman said.
They felt their way down. A dim emergency light filtered up from the base of the stairs, the glow painting the cobwebs a sickly yellow. The air was thick with dust and the rot of old masonry. The walls of the stairwell were stone, and a damp chill settled into Freeman’s bones as they descended. They gathered at the basement door and Starlene began trying keys.
“What’s the plan?” Freeman whispered.
“Get Vicky and get out,” she answered.
“Out, where?”
“We’ll make up that part when we get to it.”
“Good plan.”
“Can you read Vicky’s mind? Or, what do you call it, ‘triptrap’ her?”
“I’ve had other things on my mind. Like being a ghost.”
“Try again,” Isaac said.
Freeman shut out the sound of the water dripping behind the walls, forgot the fear of death that tickled his skin with knife tips, ignored his heart pounding as if trying to hammer its way through his rib cage, blocked whatever thoughts were racing through the minds of Starlene and Dipes and Isaac.
He sent his mind out, in that process that was still freaky even though he’d done it hundreds of times. Triptrapping, walking across that mental bridge. He concentrated, picturing Vicky’s face, the lips that said such kind words, the pretty eyes that looked all the way through him . . .
He had to back up because he was getting distracted. He couldn’t afford to think of that other stuff, that mushy, kissy lovey-dovey crap. Clint Eastwood didn’t have time for it, except in his worst movies, and neither did Freeman.
He triptrapped again, concentrating harder this time. He was rapid cycling like crazy, going from manic to depressed, up to down, white-hot to blue, throbbing like a police car’s lights. Something weird was going on, the erratic electromagnetic pulses scrambling his synapses. He was swinging from mania to depression so fast that the two almost merged into a bizarre new emotional state.
You’ve been here before.
Maybe it’s just your imagination, though, but that’s the kind of obsessive thought you have while depressed, or maybe you’re up and you think this is some kind of holy gift.
Maybe you’re supposed to use this power to be a Protector of the Innocent.
Don’t be a damned fool. Nobody’s innocent, and nobody’s worth protecting. Or is that just depression talking?
You’re innocent. You didn’t kill her.
If you try hard enough, you can make the world stop. You can make your brain go away. You’re bigger than God.
Forget about all that and CONCENTRATE. This is about saving Vicky, not you. For once in your sorry life, it’s NOT ABOUT YOU.
And then he broke through, bridged with her as she was trying to reach him, and for the most beautiful, terrible moment they were linked, their sentences cramming together and overflowing like two glasses of water poured into a third, thoughts circling and dancing and taking on meanings beyond words.
Then Freeman saw what Vicky was seeing, and wished that the gift had stayed in the hands of God or Satan or Dad or whatever else cruel bastard had given it to him.
Because Vicky was in the deadscape, big time.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“You have to get right to the source,” Kenneth Mills said. His voice rose as the power to the superconductors increased. Kracowski looked at the rows of specially-built fuse boxes that were stacked on the wall behind the tanks. He didn’t know what would happen if the whole operation shorted out, but that might be preferable to observing the results of Mills’s mind games.
The girl pounded on the door again. “You better come see.”
McDonald approached the door, hesitated, then asked Mills, “Should I open it?”
Mills cracked a grin that resembled that of a sadistic clown’s. “Sure, step right on in. Let’s see what the treatment does to you.”
Mills’s eyes were closed, and he leaned back from the computer keyboard like Captain Nemo playing a demented organ melody.
“Ah, I can see it,” Mills said. “I knew I could do it. See, McDonald, you and your Trust thought I was wrong, that I was used up and broken. And you were ready to throw me away. But you need me. I’m the only one who can make it happen.”
“Don’t keep me in the dark on this thing,” McDonald said. “Kracowski made tons of notes. Why do we have to keep guessing with you?”
“Because Kracowski wants other people to know what a genius he is. All I want is to find out for myself.”
Mills opened his eyes as if finishing a prayer, then altered the programming. “See, Kracowski, you don’t need to shock them if you want to kill them. Kill them and let their hearts keep beating. That’s the way to get inside the dead.”
Kracowski had administered death in doses that lasted for fractions of seconds. Mills appeared capable of killing millions without hesitation. After what he’d done to his own wife and son, Kracowski wouldn’t be surprised if the man wiped out the entire human race just to
prove himself right. Mills would even kill God if he had the means and opportunity. He already had the motive.
“Take a look for yourself,” Mills said. “It’s beautiful. Dead is beautiful.”
Kracowski looked at the readings on the computer screen. The amplitude was erratic, scrambled into a wave pattern he’d never seen before. Not even the radical physicists, those who linked electromagnetism with UFOs and world war and brain cancer and killer viruses, had directly connected the silent radiation with the human spirit. And Mills was pushing it with no idea what the result would be, playing a guessing game that might be far more tragic than the splitting of an atom.
Because even nuclear reactions obeyed the laws of nature, and Mills was playing in the field beyond nature.
And Kracowski damned himself for not being able to look away. He was just as curious as Mills.
“Open the door,” he heard himself saying.
McDonald put a hand on the thick handle of the slide lock. He eased the lock free and winced, as if expecting the walls to fly loose from the floor. When nothing happened, he took hold of the door handle. He paused, then knelt to the slot in the door, pulling the rusty mechanism where food had long ago been shoved to the cell’s inhabitants.
Vicky’s voice came from the slot, louder than before. “They’re eating the light,” she said, the words made even more haunting by her calmness.
Mills laughed. “Dark tastes better. Less filling. Don’t have to make yourself vomit after.”
McDonald said, “What the hell’s going on in there?”
Mills traced a strange pattern in the air with the tip of his finger. Painting an invisible Picasso, or maybe conducting a frenzied Phillip Glass piece for full orchestra. Communing with fleshless things. Or stroking the molecules of heaven.
“Damn you,” McDonald said to Mills. “Talk to me, or I’ll have your ass stuck back in the loony bin.”
The agent worked the lever on the food slot and peered inside the cell. Kracowski wondered if McDonald would be able to see anything because of the darkness. McDonald shook his head as if trying to clear his vision, then pressed his head closer to the slot. He squealed in sudden pain, as if acid had been dashed in his eyes, and rolled to the floor.
McDonald huddled with his knees against his chest and moaned unintelligible syllables. He shuddered, eyes fixed open, staring past Mills and Kracowski. Mills hurried around the computer table and grabbed the man by the jacket, shaking him. “Help me get him away from the fields,” he said to Kracowski.
Kracowski glanced at the computer screen, where the resonance image of Vicky’s brain flashed in bright purple, green, and gold, the colors one saw when pressing fingers against closed eyelids. An infrared video camera depicted an aurora surrounding her body. Other cloud-like shapes flickered against the darkness, clusters of energy that weren’t connected to the girl’s physical form.
“What did you see?” Mills shouted at McDonald, spittle flying into the dazed man’s face.
“Nuh—nuh—nuh,” he grunted in reply.
Mills pushed McDonald to the floor. He shouted at Kracowski, “Don’t touch anything. I’m going in.”
Mills yanked the cell door open. But he didn’t go in. He couldn’t.
The room was gone.
Kracowski forgot the computer, the straining machinery, the burning fear in his stomach, the hopeless sense that everything was too far out of his control, because none of that mattered.
In the face of a miracle, even the extraordinary was meaningless.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Freeman was with Vicky, bridged, as the floor disappeared beneath her feet in the cell. The darkness of the small room gave way to gray as the writhing shapes appeared like an invading army on the horizon. Faces stood out among the coalescence, sets of eyes that had seen as much horror in death as in life. Faint fingers clawed the air, tongues and teeth gnashed in silent anger.
Ghost bedlam. These spirits had shouted their broken words against the cell walls, painted their pain in the stone and steel and concrete of the basement, bounced their mad thoughts against the unyielding fences of reality. These were the patients who had been damned and doomed to live out their confused lives in the narrow basement rooms. Now they were forever committed to Wendover’s regiments of the dead.
Freeman couldn’t blame them for being angry at those who had disturbed their slumbering escape from this vicious world.
“They’re eating the light,” Vicky said.
“I know,” Freeman said. He felt the vibration as she pounded on the cell door.
“Kracowski’s machines brought them back. Here where they hurt the most.”
“They’re still lost, though. Listen . . .”
Outside Vicky’s cell came a roar like a metallic tidal wave. The other cell doors in the basement had yanked themselves open and slammed against the walls. Either the magnetic force had pulled the doors from their locks or the rooms’ former inhabitants were staging a massive jailbreak.
Disconnected and mad thoughts spilled into the open line that existed between him and Vicky, a triptrap with the spirits that froze the inside of Freeman’s skull like a hundred hits of ice cream. He recognized some of the voices from his earlier journey into the deadscape, but familiarity didn’t make them any less insane. He tried to block them, but they came regardless:
Notes in the television, doctor.
I am a tree and I leave.
Crazy as a bugbed.
A white, white room in which to write.
Freeman focused on Vicky again as the shapes drew closer. “What do they want?” she thought at him, inside him.
“Maybe they’re just coming back because they don’t have anywhere else to go. Maybe these cells were all they ever had, the closest thing to home. Sad as it sounds, maybe they belong here.”
“Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not scared,” Freeman thought.
“Look, I told you, you can’t lie to somebody who’s reading your mind.”
The spirits closed in, drawn by the invisible field, their eyes glittering, mouths gasping for air they couldn’t breathe. Freeman thought about breaking the bridge, pulling away from Vicky, and shutting off those crazy dead voices. Then he felt ashamed for his selfishness, and linked to her again with all his concentration.
The ghosts were so close that their cold mist shrouded Vicky, the impossible flesh giving off a faint effervescent light. The endless darkness around them and behind them grew even blacker, as if drawing energy from the stray photons in the basement.
“They don’t know who to blame,” Freeman thought. He felt a hand on his shoulder. Afraid it was one of the deranged ghosts, he turned. Isaac stood behind him, with Starlene and Dipes. In reality, the one with hard walls, not the just-as-real but less-solid deadscape. He crouched and closed his eyes, found Vicky again.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
“Not very far. This is weird.”
“Clint in ‘High Plains Drifter,’ huh?”
“That’ll do.”
She pounded on the door again. Freeman heard Dad’s muffled ranting on the other side of the door, then the door cracked open and a wedge of light sliced into the cell. Dad’s face appeared, his grin like a gash, eyes bright and watery.
“Vicky, meet my Dad,” Freeman triptrapped.
Freeman felt a little of his carefully hidden secrets slip out, heard Vicky gasp as she caught a glimpse of the tortures inflicted upon him, the dark days in the closet, the ESP tests, the brainwashing experiments, the needles and cattle prods and shock treatments, the infamous incident with the blowtorch and—
Luckily, Freeman shut down before she walked the halls of his memory with him, blade in hand, to visit Mom in the bathtub.
Vaporous hands reached for Vicky, passing through her. Freeman felt the contact on his own skin, then realized it was Starlene, tugging him into the basement from the stairwell door. She pulled again and Freeman lost contact with Vicky.
“What’s going on?” she asked, as Freeman shook himself back to the physical world. Dipes and Isaac looked at him as if he’d returned from Mars and they were awaiting tales of green aliens.
“Vicky,” Freeman said. “She’s in trouble.”
They could hear Freeman’s dad at the far end of the basement, laughing like the world was ending. Freeman tried to triptrap back to Vicky, but something had changed. Either Kracowski or Dad had screwed with the field again, or else Vicky had gone under.
He remembered the icy touch of that dead hand passing through her skin, and imagined it squeezing her heart. Did this mean he was down, depressed, out of the loop? He couldn’t afford that now.
“Come on,” he yelled at the others, running down the dim corridor. The glow of the machinery beckoned him, and he tried to recall the layout of the basement using Vicky’s memory. Dad had obviously renovated the set-up a little, taken control, put a new spin on Kracowski’s treatment.
The others followed him. He tried to put on his Clint Eastwood face, twisted his mouth a little and squinted through one eye, but the act felt stupid. De Niro in “Goodfellas” or Pacino in “Carlito’s Way” didn’t work. Not even Nicholson in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” would fly in this situation. No time to pretend to be a flawed hero. Besides, heroes weren’t supposed to be this scared.
He rounded the corner just as Dad threw the cell door open. A sick light leaked from the room where Vicky had been trapped, the results of Dad’s and Kracowski’s experimental solution now free from the flask, the genie out of the bottle, Pandora’s box unsealed.
The tortured souls of the insane fell through the door into the real world, a world they had never understood. A world that had shocked and strapped and chained them, a world that denied them and jailed them and forgot them. This time, they had someone to blame for their pain.
They swarmed over Dad, a dozen milky hands grabbing at him, touching, investigating, trying to make sense of this fleshly invader of their hidden land. They rode the electromagnetic fields into the basement, drawn to the machines, staring at the curved panels, the tanks, wires, and circuitry as if they were tricks in some new psychological assessment test.
