A shadow fell across the bed first, and the doorway was suddenly filled with a young, round woman with coal black hair and a full face half-hidden by large, horn-rimmed glasses. The face was dominated by a look of concern. She entered the room tentatively, carrying a small brown paper-wrapped package.
"You have company, Elliott," Cosmo informed me. "I suggest you sit up and act like a gentleman."
"Hi," the young woman said nervously.
"Do I know you?" I stammered, suddenly fearing that one of Korbac's grunting, foul-smelling generals had permanently altered one of my memory cells.
She didn't answer.
Cosmo stepped forward. "Elliott," he began cautiously, "I want you to meet the real Brenda Cashman."
The words raced repeatedly through several reference files in the E.G. Wages bank of cerebral clutter and kept sending back the same messages: "Does not compute." It took me a while before I managed to get the words out. "Did you say Brenda Cashman?"
The young woman grinned and nodded.
"When Lucy couldn't get through to you in Chambers Bay, she called me," Cosmo explained. "That's when I learned that you took Brenda with you. I, in turn, called an associate of mine in Ann Arbor. I had him do some checking. Within a matter of hours Brenda returned my call. You see, Elliott, it didn't hang together. The Brenda Cashman I knew wasn't the kind to go flitting around the countryside on the kind of insane jaunts you take."
Still grinning, the young woman confirmed Cosmo's assessment.
"But if you're Brenda Cashman," I sputtered, "who was…?"
"Her name was Adair Lindley. Like the real Brenda Cashman here, she was a doctoral candidate at the U of M, not to mention Brenda's roommate."
"I still don't understand," I protested.
The real Brenda Cashman was eager to clear up the confusion. "I really did discover the similarities in the events that traced all the way back to Choker Point on Baffin Island. I discussed it several times with Adair. We always discussed our research. She was interested, but no more than usual. Then one day I discovered all my research notes on the incidents were gone. She pretended to help me look for them, and we finally decided I had lost them somewhere on the campus. About two weeks later, she disappeared — no note, no nothing. Up to that point we always told each other where we were going. Now that I think back about it, she was a little strange at times but a really nice girl. I really liked her. All the while she was gone I figured she'd come waltzing in one day and tell me what she had been up to."
I was too stunned to say anything.
The real Brenda Cashman wasn't through. "So when Doctor Leach and I talked, it got me to thinking. I started snooping around."
"This is what I wanted you to see," Cosmo harumphed.
Brenda began to peel away the wrapping of her tightly held package. When she finished, she reached in and emerged with a small coarse brown figurine of a grotesquely shaped creature with a bloated belly. It was a replica of the sarcophagus of Sate. She held it out for my inspection. "It was sitting on the top shelf of her closet next to a small vase with a sprig of pine and a single tapered candle."
All of a sudden it was difficult to breathe. Brenda's hand again darted into the package and again emerged, this time with a crumpled piece of paper. "Cosmo thinks you should see this."
I read:
ADAIR LINDLEY
YOU AMONG THE MANY ARE CHOSEN. PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THE COMING OF THE ANCIENT OF ANCIENTS. THE EQUINOCTIAL AWAKENING OF THE YEAR '87 WILL NOT GO WELL. LEARN FROM THIS. AS EMISSARY OF THE NEXT FULL CYCLE, YOU AND YOU ALONE CAN ASSURE ATONEMENT.
I let the piece of paper flutter down on my bed.
Suddenly it all made sense. I found nothing because there was nothing to find. They had not perished in the explosion after all. They had simply moved on to begin a new cycle. The cycle was destined to be repeated — somewhere, sometime.