And then the air exploded and the figure was gone.
The researchers remained where they were, stunned into silence. All except Siem who sought and found Trout.
“Can you explain that?” Siem demanded.
“Localized aurora… St. Elmo’s fire. There is a sane explanation.”
“Well I know someone who might be able to,” he said. “I am going to get Mikel Jasso.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER 18
Caitlin was done with caution.
She’d been careful after the incidents with Jacob. She’d been tentative but complicit about communing with Galderkhaan. She’d been taking advice from well-meaning but cautious, cerebral people who barely understood what she had experienced, who did not grasp what she felt she was capable of.
That time was over. It was time to treat these deep mysteries like she had treated the rest of her life before Maanik had entered it: with action.
Caitlin let Jacob sleep. She arranged him under his covers, and, without hesitation, stalked to her living room, grabbed her keys, and left her apartment, locking Jacob in. She pushed the door to the stairwell so hard it crashed against the wall. She’d take the bad-mother guilt if he drummed and she didn’t answer. What she had to attempt would only take a few minutes and either fail… or succeed. She could risk that. The presence of strange persons in spirit was bad enough. But this new intruder had somehow appeared in the flesh. Running up the steps two at a time, she jabbed a key at the final door and burst onto the roof of her building.
Planks were laid for a deck but the furniture had been pulled aside and tarped against the early onset of cold. It wasn’t quite a 360-degree view; a building loomed to block the north, another impeded half the view of the Hudson River. But to the east and south, it was all streetlights, the dark silhouettes of water towers, a few luridly colored LED spires.
Caitlin raised her arms as if to embrace the skies and all the time that had passed under them. Her soul felt primal, stripped of civilization and inhibition, ready to journey.
She couldn’t use the cazh. For one thing there was just one of her. From everything she had seen in Galderkhaan, the ritual required at least two or more. For another, she could not risk leaving here, spiritually. If Jacob did more than drum, if he woke and she wasn’t there or god forbid went into crisis… well, she had to be there.
Finally, and perhaps most frightening to her, Caitlin could not risk wanting to leave. She remembered how ecstatic she’d been in the UN that night as the mass of souls took her up with them. It was like the addicts she had treated: To a one, they knew what they were doing was unhealthy. But they liked the way it felt.
With purpose bordering on fanaticism, she planted her feet toward the southeast and looked across the city. The bay wasn’t visible but she knew where it was. She oriented toward “big water” just as the Galderkhaani had done so many millions of years ago, and extended her arms toward it. The connection was immediate. It was similar to what she had felt in the train coming back from the session with Odilon—total expansion of self in every direction. But now that she wasn’t resisting, it was exponentially more intense and more pervasive. The eastern mystics professed it and people made it a joke: “Make me one with everything.” But that’s exactly what it was.
This is real. I’m not imagining it.
Very slightly, she pointed the first two fingers of her right hand. The result was almost visible, it was so potent. A white—veil was the only word that came to mind—stretched from her body and began to coagulate, to writhe like smoke, moving, seeking through the city, probing and elongating. Caitlin felt her heart galloping as the serpent moved south and east, rising and hovering below the clouds and then suddenly striking down toward the earth. It stopped cold on Chinatown. There was the woman from the subway. Caitlin could feel her as if she were standing right next to her. She turned toward Caitlin in shock.
Come back here, Caitlin thought at her sharply. Now.
Her own voice was loud in her head and, apparently, outside of it; Caitlin heard several dogs barking before she dropped her hands and the conduit snapped shut. Arfa must have been freaking below her.
Her breathing and heartbeat became regular as she came back to where she was. She was proud that she had done it. And she had done it. Now all she had to do was go downstairs and wait.
Jacob continued to sleep peacefully. Arfa was nowhere to be seen. When she tired of waiting, she paced into the living room and, by force of habit, turned on the TV. The local station had breaking news about animal insanity across Manhattan. Now that Caitlin was paying attention, she realized that the dogs she’d heard barking hadn’t yet stopped.
Central Park Zoo got the most attention. Cell phone video showed monkeys that wouldn’t stop howling. The sea lions were screaming too, and some of the birds kept flying into the sides of their cages. On the phone, the keeper for the zoo’s rain forest habitat reported that the animals had grouped together, regardless of species, with their bellies flat on the ground and as much foliage for camouflage as they could find.
“The boa constrictor is apparently taking a nap,” the anchor reported. The video showed the reptile coiled in a corner, wrapped around itself seemingly at rest.
Caitlin thought back to the profound experience with the snake in Haiti.
“What are you doing?” Caitlin asked aloud, pondering the snake. “Observing? Waiting? Ignoring?”
Perhaps all or none of the above. Caitlin thought about other snakes that had fascinated her throughout her life, from the serpentine shape of her “spirit” headed toward Chinatown, to the snakes of Medusa and the Garden of Eden, to Cleopatra and the caduceus—the symbol of the medical profession. Her world.
“Why you?” she wondered, watching the big snake on TV. “Maybe the scientists are right,” she mused. It was all there in an airplane magazine article she read a year or so ago. Researchers believed that superstring structures bound all matter on a subatomic and supercosmic level. Perhaps they got the name wrong. It could be the strings were snakes.
The news report concluded with a late-breaking update that emergency room visits were up dramatically with victims of bites, mainly from dogs, cats, rodents, and what were being described as “kamikaze pigeons.”
Caitlin bolted from her seat and went searching for Arfa. She found him in her bedroom closet, having forced his way under the door. He was cowering and emitting the tiniest of mews. He hunched even more as she ventured closer. Unlike the other animals, he did not attack.
“I understand,” Caitlin said with a soft smile. “I’m kind of radioactive to you. Attacking will hurt you more than me.”
She returned to the living room, shut off the TV, and began to pace just as the intercom buzzed. Caitlin hurried to it. “Yes?”
“I am here,” said an unfamiliar voice. Her accent was odd enough that Caitlin couldn’t place it.
“Come up,” she said.
“There is one condition,” the woman said before Caitlin could hit the buzzer to release the door.
“What is it?” Caitlin asked.
“Do not access Galderkhaan while I am there. For both our sakes.”
“Fine,” Caitlin said grimly. “You answer my questions, I won’t push the boundaries.”
“And I won’t cause you harm,” the woman answered coldly.