"Thank you, Claire. Now, I'd like you to picture yourself poised at the threshold of a doorway," he said, himself building a mental image of what he described. "This doorway represents a portal to the past, and in a moment I'm going to ask you to open the door and step inside. The place and time we're about to revisit is the occasion of your accident. The difference in this instance, however, is that I will be present as well, ready to lend you all the support I can. And you will have the authority to alter the scene at any point you desire. I'm going to take hold of your wrist now, so that you'll know I am truly with you."
When Claire made no demur, he reached out with his left hand and gently encircled her near wrist, setting his fingertips on the pulse-point. Claire trembled slightly at his touch, but made no attempt to pull away. His own breath coming calm and slow, Adam let himself sink into trance as well, waiting until his pulse synchronized with hers. Then he closed his eyes and let himself enter the scene he had built in his mind's eye, hopefully well-matched with Claire's.
Sensory impressions from his own body receded into hazy obscurity. The transition was like overstepping a stream. A momentary sensation of imbalance gave way to a sense of firm footing as he settled into the scene, standing before a tall portal half-shrouded in shimmering silver fog.
And standing beside him, her spirit-form unconfined to any wheelchair, Claire was gazing up at the door, head flung back.
"Tell me what you see, Claire," he murmured aloud.
Ignoring his request, Claire put her hand to the door and lifted the latch, which yielded without a sound. The door opened when she gave it a push, and to his surprise, she stepped boldly across the threshold.
Adam darted after her, preparing to intervene, but he found himself out-of-doors, beneath the dim sweep of a nighttime sky. The grass beneath his feet was flecked here and there with cast-off bits of litter, and gave way to a ribbon of tarmac an arm-span to his left. Houses were visible on the opposite side of the road a quarter of a mile away, their rooftops dimly silhouetted against the amber glow of a distant row of street lamps. Though Adam had not yet been to the scene of Claire's accident in the flesh, somehow he knew it would be exactly as he saw it.
"Now, don't tell me you didn't enjoy yourself tonight!" a woman's voice said in the darkness. "Once the baby arrives, you'll be glad we made the most of these last few opportunities to slip out for the evening."
It was Claire Crawford's voice, both in reality and in his visualization - and he saw that the Claire standing beside him in vision was the same who had appeared in Tom Lennox's photographs, her shorn locks restored, wearing a light-colored cardigan over a denim smock, her body gently rounded by advancing pregnancy. She was smiling, her dark curls bobbing in the breeze, and Adam realized that she was speaking to him in place of her dead husband.
Even as the setting registered, a set of headlamps appeared in the distance and began to converge with frightening speed, flaring like strobe lights. As the glare expanded to encompass them, Adam saw the woman at his side make a sudden lunge, calculated not to carry her out of danger, but to place herself squarely in the path of the onrushing car.
In that same instant Adam was gripped by a sense of genuine peril. Without time to analyze the situation, he yielded to instinct and tried to wrench her back.
"No!" she gasped, head wildly shaking in denial as she fought him. "Let me go! I must see the driver! I must!"
The car was almost upon them. Brakes squealing, it made as if to veer aside. Exerting all his strength, Adam forced her back onto the grassy verge just as the car flashed on by. Its passage raised a gale of wind and grit, and left him with racing pulse and pounding heart.
"Why did you stop me?" Claire demanded hoarsely, aloud as well as in their shared vision. Vision-fists pounded impotently against his shoulders as she rounded on him with blazing eyes and angry tears. "You should have let me seel What happens to me doesn't matter. All I'm trying to do is get close enough to see his facel"
The truth dawned on Adam like a thunderclap. In that instant of revelation, he realized that the scenario into which he had just been pulled had been drawn not from Claire's memory of her original accident, but rather from a follow-up dream born of unfulfilled compulsion - the desperate yearning to identify her husband's killer.
The situation at Carnage Corridor suddenly became crystal clear. Given focus by the longing embodied in her dreams, Claire Crawford was returning on the astral to the scene of the accident, unaware that the cars she was now confronting were real. So convincing was her astral presence, powered as it was by her own emotional turmoil, that the drivers involved were being wholly taken in by the illusion. To avoid hitting her, they were swerving off the road to their deaths.
And had Adam's own intervention a moment earlier perhaps narrowly averted yet another tragedy? Even as he considered that possibility, Claire's voice broke in sharply, high and strained.
"Why did you stop me?" she demanded again. "Don't you understand? Until the driver of that car is caught and punished, my husband and my baby won't be able to rest easy!''
Her fierce accusation conjured a brief but poignant vision of John Crawford laid out in his coffin, the tiny form of his infant daughter cradled in one arm.
"Damn you!" Claire cried, her fingers digging into his arm. "You should have let me see!"
Her sudden fury was like a blast of burning wind. The sheer, undisciplined force of it staggered Adam, and the surrounding dream-landscape shrivelled away like so much burning celluloid, plunging him into sudden darkness.
As good as blind, he raised the focus of his right hand and the ring it wore and cried out the Word of power that was his to command on the astral. His utterance called forth a spark of blue flame from the ring's stone, which expanded and fragmented, sending javelins of sapphire cleaving outward in all directions. Before that light, the darkness fell back, showing him a vaulted tunnel stretching off into murky distances.
Stalactites and stalagmites lined the passageway like ranks of dragon's teeth. The floor was pooled with black wherever their shadows overlapped. Straining his eyes to penetrate the gloom, Adam caught sight of Claire Crawford's fleeing form. Determined to stay with her, he held his ring-hand before him to light the way, and set out after her.
A red glow materialized ahead, growing brighter as he approached. Claire's racing figure showed up as a black silhouette against the glare. The light intensified, volcanic in its jewelled radiance. Like a meteor drawn toward the sun, Claire abruptly vanished into the midst of it.
Fearing he might lose her in this labyrinth of dreams, Adam plunged on after her. A rift opened up before him, a scarlet slash in the surrounding rock. Waves of hot air hissed and roared through the rift like the sulphurous fumes from a lava pit. Shielding his face with his right arm, Adam pressed forward as far as the opening, then stopped short at the sight that met his eyes.
He was standing at the cavernous edge of a lake of fire. Out on the lake, wild torrents of flame leapt and seethed like magma in a cauldron, around an island ringed with blazing whirlpools. Standing alone on the island was Claire Crawford.
Fire roared around her like a cyclone. On a lectern before her lay an open book, its pages alight with tongues of dancing flame. The sight of it told Adam where he was - back in the hall of Akashic Records, catapulted thither by the spontaneous rapport he had formed with Claire Crawford, translated past her mind's inner defenses into the raging core of her heart-of-hearts.