There were two people in the world who would have recognized the sound.
A psychiatrist seven and a half thousand miles away and her ten-year-old son.
CHAPTER 11
A cat woke from a nap on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and lightly descended from the couch to the floor. He stretched his shoulders, then stood for a moment, still half-asleep. Then he ran at full speed out of the room, down the hall, out of sight.
Caitlin and Jacob O’Hara sat at the table having breakfast, watching Arfa’s impromptu sprint. Caitlin was tempted to go find him but Jacob was in the middle of a dramatic reenactment of what it must have been like to be the chef on the Nautilus and refused to be distracted. He was so fired up he’d been holding a glass of almond milk for at least five minutes despite occasionally sloshing it onto his hand.
Suddenly, Jacob dropped the glass on the table. Raising both fists in the air, he threw his head back, eyes squeezed tight, a picture of frustration.
“Jake, honey?”
Caitlin knelt by his chair suddenly worried that perhaps Jacob’s recovery from the episode at the cooking school was really just the eye of a storm.
“En…do…,” he said, as though he were struggling to form words. “En…dovi…”
Caitlin reached out and touched him lightly on his face. Jacob reared back as though repulsed by human contact.
Then he brought both fists down on the table. It was a tense but controlled movement—not in a rage, not aimed at anything, more like trying to gather himself—except that the table met his fists with a massive thump. The impact startled him, as if he’d forgotten the table was there. His eyes jerked open and Caitlin, horrified at what she was seeing, realized that Jacob was suddenly himself again. Which meant, even more terrifying, that for those few seconds he had not been himself.
Jacob looked at his hands, looked at the table covered in milk, looked at his mother, and began to cry.
For more than ten minutes, Jacob continued to writhe in Caitlin’s arms.
First he would twist away so he could sign with both hands, then he would turn to his mother to clutch at her neck. Signing was his default, emergency mode, and though he was wearing his hearing aid, he wasn’t responding to anything Caitlin was saying. She didn’t want to break the embrace to face him and sign herself. He was only signing one thing.
“I want to go to bed… I want to go to bed.”
Caitlin stood, hoisted his legs around her waist and carried him. Any other time she would have felt the burn in her legs under the weight of a growing ten-year-old, but not now. She walked quickly down the hall, feeling Jacob’s wrists move against her back as he continued to sign, clutch, sign.
But as much as he wanted to go to bed, he was not quite ready to be left alone. As if he were three years old, Jacob wanted the comfort of the full bedtime routine, including help from Caitlin taking out his hearing aid and changing into his pajamas. He even demanded to floss and brush his teeth, something he typically disliked. Finally, with his head on the pillow and the sheets and two blankets pulled up to his chin and perfectly smoothed over his chest, his stuffed, fraying whale from the Museum of Natural History under his left arm, he sobbed his last sob and calmed. Caitlin slipped her left hand under his right hand and he slapped her hand away.
“No talking, Mommy,” he signed. “Hug.”
She curled over and hugged him tight. Then, sitting back, seeing that he was still gazing at her, she finally signed, “What happened?”
“It didn’t work,” he signed back, his eyes downcast.
“What didn’t work?”
“There was sky and then there was ice and water that was on fire.”
The mention of fire sent a shiver up Caitlin’s back. This was the second time he’d had a vision that included fire. Her whole experience of Galderkhaan involved fire, and then there was Maanik and Atash, the latter of whom had died from it.
“What are we talking about?” she asked with slow, patient gestures. “Can you tell me that?”
He shook his head, then signed, “I have to sleep now.”
She wanted to ask if he was alone, if he had seen people, heard them talking, felt something, but she didn’t want to put any ideas in his head.
“All right, honey,” she signed. “You sleep.”
Caitlin was reluctant to leave it at that but knew that Jacob didn’t do his best when pressed. She kissed his forehead.
“Sleep,” she signed.
“Sleep, Mommy,” he said in agreement.
He turned over, curled in the fetal position, and put his forefingers in his mouth. He hadn’t done that in six years.
Caitlin closed his door behind her and stood for a moment with her hand on the doorknob. Have I brought this on my son?
She stalked back down the hall to the sunny living room, awash with an anger and guilt she had never felt in her life. She couldn’t keep her thoughts straight, couldn’t sit, couldn’t control her breaths and didn’t want to. The memories were battering into her brain—Maanik screaming, squirming in bed, barely making sense before descending into gibberish, then screaming again. Was Jacob taking his first steps into that same cycle? If so, why? She had stopped the assault, over a week ago. Those souls were gone.
Caitlin whipped back and forth across her living room cursing.
Her phone rang. She let it go for a couple of seconds, then crossed the room to grab it from her purse. The screen said it was her father and she thought, Not now! as if she were yelling at him. She flung the phone onto the table and returned to the living room.
What if those Galderkhaan souls are back, somehow? If they didn’t die before, I’m going to make sure they do this time. And where the hell is the cat?
Had Arfa sensed something in the apartment again? Was that why he ran out of the room before Jacob fell apart?
Caitlin felt something rising inside of her, something dark and ugly that wasn’t just a protective parent, wasn’t simply outrage. It rose up her back like molten rock, turning every nerve to fire. She had to fight to keep from breaking something.
At that moment the cat entered from the hallway, ambling at his usual pace. He walked straight to his food dish by the archway to the kitchen and settled on his haunches for a long chow down. Still frustrated and wanting to scream it out, Caitlin got close to him to test his responsiveness. He didn’t even twitch an ear. Nothing amiss there.
So this isn’t the same as Maanik and her dog, Caitlin thought. This is something different.
Because life wasn’t strange enough, it had to get stranger. And endanger her son.
She jumped when the phone rang again. On autopilot, she grabbed it from the table. This time it was Anita. She rejected the call, dropped the phone on the table, and hurried back into the living room. She needed the wider space around her, needed to think, but she couldn’t. Nor was there any reason to think: she knew what she had to do.
She had to get back to Galderkhaan to see what, if anything, might be causing this. But then she remembered the horrible white ice trap she’d traveled to last time she tried, where she’d heard an invisible Jacob knocking for her and she couldn’t reach him.
Stark fear saturated her anger. Was there a connection? Had she done this to him?