by Ian Rogers
Sally took it out of his hand and looked at it. “What’s it supposed to be?” she asked. “A tooth?”
“It’s a shark fin,” Toby said. He took her hand gently in his own and started moving it back and forth through the air while humming the Jaws theme.
Sally laughed in spite of herself. “Thanks, Toby. I’ll cherish it forever.”
“You should. That’s a valuable psychic artifact. It’ll end up in the Mereville Group’s private collection one of these days.”
Charles came over. He pointed at Sally. “You’re the bait.” He pointed at Toby. “You’re the fishing rod. You’ll be stationed in the doorway. Your job is to reel Sally in at the first sign of trouble.”
“Where will you be?” Toby asked.
“I’ll be in there, too, also as bait, but I’ve got a feeling Sally is going to present a much more tantalizing meal.”
Charles handed Sally a flashlight and took one for himself. Toby didn’t get one. He needed to keep his hands free.
They walked around the far side of the warehouse to the door Frank Budden had used to get inside.
Charles went in first, turning his flashlight on, followed by Sally, while Toby remained in the doorway, as ordered. It was the first order he’d been given that he was actually happy to carry out.
There was no electricity in the building—the power had been off since 1961—and it was dark inside. But not as dark as it could’ve been. Even without their flashlights, there were banks of windows on the east and west sides of the building—several of them smashed, as Voorman had told them—letting in a dim, milky light.
Sally shined her flashlight around, but there wasn’t much to see. The building appeared to be completely empty. Her beam passed over a stain on the concrete floor, and she brought the light back to look at it more closely. It looked like an oil stain, only it was still wet. She peered closer, realized it was blood from where part of Frank Budden’s dismembered body had lain, and snapped the beam up toward the rafters.
Her breathing quickened and she tried to slow it down by focusing her attention on the view overhead. There were a few holes in the corrugated steel roof, but for the most part it was holding up pretty well for its age. Breathe in, breathe out. She brought the flashlight back down and walked around the stain on the floor, pretending it wasn’t there.
On the far side of the warehouse, Charles was looking up at one of the three massive doors that opened onto the lake. The doors were closed, but the water lapped rhythmically within the channels extending into the building. Some fog had drifted in with the water and gave the channels the appearance of three rectangular, bubbling cauldrons.
“Careful you don’t fall in,” Sally called over to him.
Charles waved at her with his flashlight.
Sally resumed wandering the floor, panning her flashlight around—being sure to move it quickly away whenever it landed on a questionable stain—and in general avoiding the thing she knew she was supposed to be doing.
At one point she stopped and pointed the light at her left hand. Faint white lines ran across three of the fingers. On her right hand there was a crescent-shaped mark in the webbing between the thumb and index finger. Souvenirs from her one and only visit to the house on Ashley Avenue, courtesy of an entity composed of a broken mirror. A looking-glass creature like something out of Wonderland. Which, she supposed, made her Alice. Only most days she wasn’t sure which world she was living in.
She was scared, but she knew there was no shame in that. Charles said only show-offs and shitheads laugh in the face of death. There was nothing wrong with fearing death, he said. It was natural. Death was the great unknown. In much the same way, the supernatural was largely unknown. It was okay to fear it, too, Charles said, as long as you didn’t let it paralyze you. The Mereville Group had learned a great deal about the supernatural, and they were learning more every day. They did it by confronting their fears, by walking boldly into the darkness with their eyes wide open.
So that’s what Sally did. She turned off her flashlight and closed her eyes.
Then opened the ones inside her mind.
VI
There was nothing in the warehouse. Sally was almost disappointed. Almost.
When she projected her astral self, she had expected to see the empty factory floor transformed into some spectral realm of dark delights. But it just looked like the same old crappy warehouse.
The whole astral projection bit was relatively new to her. It was an extension of her telepathic abilities, and when properly developed, she was supposed to be able to travel to other dimensions and planes of existence. To date she’d managed to successfully project herself into two locations—the cafeteria of the Mereville Group’s Toronto field office, and the bathroom in her condo.
She wasn’t exactly the Neil Armstrong of astral projection, but so what? Practice made perfect, right? And she didn’t need to be perfect today. She only needed to be bait.
Charles had walked along the edge of one of the concrete channels and was now examining the motorized pulley assembly that controlled the large bay door.
Sally’s astral body drifted over to him, swimming through the air. Even though the action required no actual movement of her ethereal form, she found herself stroking through the air with her astral arms and legs anyway. She propelled herself toward the ceiling, then spun herself around so she was looking down at the top of Charles’s head.
His hair is thinning, Sally thought. Poor Charles.
She swung back and did a slow circle of the warehouse, her astral body passing through the rust-pocked rafters. She glanced out one of the intact upper windows. Fog pressed against the glass, but with her astral eyes she could see through it to the city beyond. There was so much energy out there, so many people packed tightly together—she was glad the warehouse was isolated out here on the lakeshore. She probably wouldn’t have been able to do what she needed to do if they were any closer to the city.
She was about to bank around and do another circuit when she happened to glance down and saw Toby waving at her from the open doorway. Waving not at her body, which stood motionless on the factory floor, but at her astral form floating fifty feet overhead.
The shock of being seen in her present state was enough to break her concentration, and Sally felt her consciousness snap back into her body with enough psychic momentum that she actually stumbled a few steps and almost fell on her ass.
“What do you call that?” Toby said. “Psychically chumming the waters? It wasn’t bad, but you could use some work on your astral backstroke.”
“You could see me?” Sally said. She felt a strange compulsion to cover her body, as if she’d been seen naked. Which, in a way, she supposed she had.
Toby shrugged. “It was a surprise to me, too. Mostly I move stuff around with my mind. I’ve never seen anything on the astral plane before.” He looked around the interior of the warehouse. “Maybe it’s this place.”
“Maybe,” Sally said.
“Did you pick up anything?”
“Not yet.”
“You got plans later?”
The question was so unexpected it threw her off balance for a moment. “What?” she said. “You mean if we’re still alive?”
“Yeah,” Toby said. “If we’re not all horribly massacred by the ghost of a prehistoric sea creature, I was wondering if you wanted to check out Northern Lights with me.”
“The northern lights?” Sally said. “You mean the aurora borealis? I don’t think you can see them in Toronto.”
“No,” Toby said. “Northern Lights. It’s a vape bar in the Annex.”
Sally looked at him. “You vape?”
“Oh sure.” Toby reached into his jacket and took out something that looked like a flute with a case of the mumps. “It’s a pungi. Instrument used by snake charmers in Nepal. Converted for vaping, of course.”
He put it in his mouth and swayed from side to side in an enticing manner.
S
ally shook her head. “I’m afraid the only snake you’ll be charming tonight will be your own.” With a grin, she added: “And if you keep this up, I’m gonna file a sexual harassment complaint against you.”
Toby slapped a hand over his heart, looking wounded. “You would do that to me?” He called over to Charles. “Hey Chuck, does the Mereville Group have a human resources department?”
“Of sorts,” Charles said. “But they’re not exactly human. And if you keep calling me Chuck, I promise you’ll find out all about them.”
VII
An hour went by and nothing happened. A second hour passed and still nothing. The sun had started going down, and the fog outside the windows turned from a tarnished silver to a dirty, dusky gray. The anxiety and excitement they’d felt upon entering the warehouse had drained off, leaving the trio feeling emotionally hungover and more than a little bored.
Toby was still stationed in the doorway, sucking occasionally on his pungi, and turning his head to blow clouds of fragrant vapour out into the early-evening air. Charles paced slowly across the warehouse, back and forth, the soles of his Italian loafers slapping against the dusty concrete floor.
Sally was the only one doing any actual work—although it wasn’t visible to the human eye. It would not have been inaccurate to say she was, in that moment, in two places at the same time.
Her body was standing in the middle of the warehouse floor, while her astral form was back exploring the dark corners of the spirit realm.
Unfortunately she was having the same results as last time—which was to say, no results.
Although her astral vision could perceive much more than her physical eyes, she wasn’t seeing anything particularly noteworthy. The crumbling architecture of the warehouse was visible to her in stark relief, as if she were seeing a highly detailed MRI of the entire building, but there was nothing useful there.
She propelled her astral self down to ground level and hovered over the middle channel. As she pretended to walk across the surface of the water, she saw something she hadn’t noticed before. Or rather, it was something she couldn’t see.
It was the water in the three channels that came in under the bay doors. It appeared as dark to her now as it had to her regular eyes. It was, in fact, the only thing in the warehouse she couldn’t see in preternatural detail.
She swivelled around and called out to Charles, but of course he couldn’t hear her while she was in her present state. She waved at Toby, but he was leaning against the doorframe with his back to the room.
Sally frowned and spun back around. She hesitated for a second, then lowered herself into the water. It was less like slipping into a pool than riding an elevator down into the dark murk. She kept going until the water closed over her head and she was in complete darkness.
She couldn’t see or feel anything—which came as a shock. The astral plane was alive with impressions and stimuli much more complex than those processed by the senses of her physical body. To see and feel nothing at all was a new experience, and an unsettling one.
Since she had no awareness of her surroundings, she wondered if she was still drifting through the water. What if she got turned around and couldn’t figure out which way was up? This in turn caused Sally to consider an even more important question: What if she couldn’t get back to her body?
If it were possible for an astral body to hyperventilate, Sally would’ve been doing so at that moment. Even though her breathing exercises were useless here, she went through them anyway. Breathing in through her astral nose, and out through her astral mouth.
She opened her mind and sent out telepathic feelers in the hope of finding her way back to the light. Charles had told her it was dangerous to expose herself in this way, but she didn’t have a choice. She had a horrible vision of her astral self drifting through this darkness forever.
She could even picture it—a tiny glint of light set against an endless black backdrop. A blackdrop, Sally thought, and giggled. It felt good to laugh. It helped push back the dark.
The glint of light was still there, and Sally realized she wasn’t seeing it with her mind. It was really there, in the darkness, and it was getting bigger.
She started to drift toward it. Maybe it was her body sending up a psychic flare so she could find her way back home. She had never travelled this far on the astral plane before. Surely this was something her mind was designed to do to keep her from getting lost forever. A built-in safety feature, like telepathic GPS.
At some point—it was hard to gauge time—Sally became aware of two things. The first was that she was no longer in Lake Ontario. She had felt her astral body moving through the dark water, and then she passed through into another place even darker and deeper. A fathomless abyss that made her feel smaller and more insignificant than when she first became lost.
The second thing was that the light she was moving toward was not her body.
She didn’t know what it was, but it was getting closer. And bigger. She tried to push away from it, but it was as if she were caught in an undertow, pulling her toward the thing.
As they were drawn closer and closer together, she finally saw it for what it was. All of her psychic senses were attuned, so when the thing from the abyss appeared before her, she saw it in all its terrifying glory.
And when she felt/saw/sensed it was opening its mouth to swallow her whole, Sally did the only thing she could.
She opened her mind and screamed.
VIII
Toby screamed, too, and dropped his pungi. He might have also peed himself a little.
He spun around in the doorway and looked over at Sally. She hadn’t screamed, although he could have sworn he’d heard her. She was standing in the middle of the warehouse, motionless, like she had been for the last twenty minutes or so.
But something was different.
He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it. It was a new experience for him, much like the way he’d been able to see Sally’s astral form doing a Peter Pan impression around the ceiling. He figured she must still be on the astral plane; only if she was, he couldn’t see her.
Focusing with his mind instead of his eyes, he was able to make out something he at first thought was the beam from Sally’s flashlight. But her flashlight was off, hanging by her side in one limp hand.
This light was thinner and brighter, a focused beam of the purist white emanating from the middle of her forehead, in the spot where one’s mystical third eye was supposed to be.
The beam extended across the length of the warehouse on a downward sloping angle, terminating in the water of the middle channel.
As Toby watched, the narrow cord of light trembled like a plucked spiderweb. The luminescence stuttered as if a switch was being rapidly turned off and on.
Even though he was not a sensitive, Toby was a psychic in his own right, and thus receptive to such forces. The vibe he was picking up from Sally was one of intense fear and panic. The beam of light, which must’ve been some sort of tether to her astral body, was stretching and straining so much he worried it might snap. He didn’t know what effect it would have on Sally if that happened. Would her body simply drop dead like a puppet with its strings cut? Would her spirit be left to wander the astral plane forever?
Toby looked over at Charles, who was leaning against the far wall checking messages on his phone.
“Chuck … Charles, I think something’s wrong with Sally.”
Charles looked up from his phone, then pocketed it and came trotting over. He waved a hand in front of Sally’s face, but her eyes remained glazed and unfocused. He reached out to shake her shoulder and Toby said, “Don’t!”
“What’s wrong?” Charles said. “What’s happening to her?”
Toby looked from Charles to Sally … and then to the dark water of the channel.
“I think she’s in the lake.”
“What?”
“I think she’s in trouble.”
Charles took out his phone, t
hen seemed to realize anyone he might call for help wouldn’t arrive in time. He jammed it back into his pocket and said: “Can you do anything?”
Toby shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Charles gripped his shoulder firmly. “Try.”
He nodded and turned back to Sally.
Toby was a telekinetic; he could move and manipulate objects with his mind. Physical objects. He’d never used his powers on something—or someone—incorporeal. He didn’t even know if it could be done. But like Charles said, he had to try.
He took a deep breath and tried to focus his thoughts. Then, when he was ready—or as ready as he was going to be—he reached out with his mind and grasped Sally’s astral tether.
It was like touching a live wire with about fifty thousand volts running through it. It galvanized him, and should’ve killed him, but his mental defences were as strong as they were instinctive, and he was able to raise a psychic shield that blocked the majority of the surge. Still, it was powerful enough to light up every neuron in his brain.
Had it been an actual attack against him, he doubted there was anything he could have done to protect himself. But this wasn’t an attack. It was a cry for help. A psychic SOS transmitted along the astral tether and delivered directly into his mind.
In that moment, he experienced a vertiginous moment of bilocation. Not only could he see Sally at the far end of the tether—her distant form looking small and helpless as it struggled like a worm on a hook—he could also feel himself inside Sally, experiencing her fear and panic firsthand. It was so overwhelming, this hurricane of emotions that weren’t his own, that he almost lost his mental hold on the tether.
Pulling back from Sally and the darkness in which she dwelt—The abyss! I’m trapped in the abyss!—Toby was able to reassert both his will and his grip on the psychic cord. Then, after performing the mental equivalent of spitting in his hands, he began to reel her in.
