“In my dream, I have hands,” Walter repeated softly under his breath.
“What did you say?” Bell looked around at him, frowning.
For a long moment, Walter didn’t reply, just pursed his lips, thinking.
“Belly,” he finally said, “I know that you’re familiar with the latest theories of poltergeist activity.”
“I was afraid you were going to come to that conclusion,” Bell replied. “Yes, of course I’m familiar with those theories. The repression of rage, of frustration, building up in the hormonally charged cortexes of pubescent adolescents, is thought to manifest itself in telekinetic storms that are often mistaken for the work of malicious ghosts.”
Walter nodded.
“And perhaps in demented old men, as well.”
“What are you saying?” Bell asked. “You believe the two events were different occurrences of the same phenomenon?”
“I’m afraid I believe more than that,” Walter replied.
“We can’t know that,” Bell countered. “There’s no reason to cast blame on...”
“Oh, come now. It can’t be a coincidence.” Walter waved a hand at the wreckage that surrounded them. “This kind of event is so rare as to be the stuff of myth. Modern science has never managed to verify that it has ever truly occurred. Ever! And yet we have just witnessed not just one instance, but two. Two! And both happening at the exact moment when we were in the middle of...”
“Keep your voice down, Walter,” Bell hissed. “We don’t want to add to the already considerable panic.”
He took Walter’s arm and led him back down the steps into Mrs. Baumgartner’s apartment, and then out through the kitchen into the back yard, where things were quiet and calm and green, and the world didn’t seem quite so crazy. The cement bunnies remained serene and unaffected by the chaos.
“What the hell is going on out there?” Nina called from inside the apartment.
Walter hardly heard her. He was still trying to make his point.
“There must be some correlation,” he said. “There has to be!” Then he remembered what he’d seen when he first came out of the trip. Bell and Nina kneeling face-to-face, staring into each other’s eyes.
“Belly,” Walter said. “You linked minds with Nina, didn’t you?”
“Well,” Bell began, unable to meet Walter’s gaze.
“Embarrassment has no place in scientific method!” Walter said brusquely. “Anyway, never mind all that, tell me—did you or did you not link minds with Nina, instead of me?”
“Yes,” Bell admitted. “I have no idea how it could have happened, when she wasn’t even tripping.”
“Clearly she was the one who was foremost in your thoughts in that moment,” Walter said. “Not that I blame you, given her apparent aversion to brassieres, but that’s something for us to analyze later. What’s far more important to consider is the fact that both times we used this particular blend, a powerful psychic link was created. The first time it was you and me, then later on, with the killer as well. This time it was you and Nina. Am I correct?”
“Yes, you are correct,” Bell said. “Okay, so...?”
“So, she wasn’t tripping with us, but somehow our own heightened psychic abilities caused any latent power in her to be activated, as well.”
“What are you saying?”
“What I’m saying is this—what if our special blend not only enhances our own abilities, but also causes some kind of psychic pulse that radiates outward. We become, for lack of a better word, amplifiers, like the ones in a radio set. Perhaps, in our heightened state, we pick up weak psychic energy around us, such as the angst of a teenager, for instance, or the unfocused rage of a demented old man, and amplify it a hundredfold.”
“Or maybe it was the gate itself that activated and amplified the phenomenon,” Bell countered.
“Could be,” Walter said. “But either way, this amplification of latent psychic power occurred, and all of a sudden the repressed frustration hidden inside the affected individuals explodes outward in a storm of psychic fury and... and...” Walter paled as something occurred to him. “My God, Belly. We are very fortunate that no one was killed.”
Bell gave him a cold look.
“You’re acting as if you believe this is our fault.”
“Of course it’s our fault!” Walter was almost shouting now. “Maybe it was a side effect of the way our minds were enhanced, or maybe it was caused by the gate that we opened by using the special blend, but ask yourself this: Would any of this have occurred if we hadn’t done our experiment?” Before Bell could reply, Walter continued. “It would not! We are directly responsible for that poor woman’s wounds, and for all that property damage on the street.”
“I told you to keep your voice down, dammit.”
“But...”
Bell grabbed his arm.
“Listen to me,” he hissed into Walter’s ear. “We can analyze what went wrong and discuss our own responsibility or lack thereof in private, but shouting that we are responsible out here, where that angry mob out front can hear us? That’s a very bad idea.”
Nina came out through the back door of Mrs. Baumgartner’s apartment.
“The paramedics have arrived,” she said. “Want to fill me in on what the hell happened out there?”
Walter looked from Bell to Nina and back again. He nodded.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s go back inside.”
As they stepped in through the back door of Nina’s house, Roscoe and Abby were coming in through the front door.
“Man,” Roscoe said. “Looks like somebody bombed the building next door!”
“I don’t think anybody was hurt,” Abby said, looking back over her shoulder. “But, oh, that poor piano!”
“Crazy, huh?” Nina said, hustling Walter and Bell up the stairs. “We’ll see you later.”
Walter heard Roscoe’s voice echo up after them.
“What’s with them anyway?”
Then Abby’s faint response.
“Are there any more Ding Dongs? Little Bobby is starving.”
Nina shut her bedroom room door and then ran over to the windows, peering out into the street below.
“This formula we’ve created is obviously extremely dangerous, and unpredictable,” Walter said. “I can’t help but wonder if we will be causing more harm than good by continuing to experiment with it.”
“But how else can we hope to send that monster back where he came from?” Bell asked. “I just don’t see any other way.”
“We could just shoot him,” Nina suggested.
“Maybe so,” Walter replied. “But putting aside the moral ambiguities of vigilantism, do we even know that he’s human? Maybe he can’t be killed, in the conventional sense of the word.”
“He definitely seemed human,” Nina said.
“I still think we need to stick to our original plan,” Bell said. “We brought him into this world, it’s up to us to send him away.”
“Walter,” Nina said. “Before all of the craziness, you said you saw the gate, didn’t you.”
“Yes,” he said. “But it was smaller than the first time, and seemed kind of... I don’t know... unstable. I’m fairly certain that, because Belly was distracted and wound up linked with you instead of me, my own chemically enhanced ability wasn’t strong enough to keep it open single-handedly. Or, should I say, single-mindedly?”
“So,” Bell said. “We need to figure out a way to link our minds together deliberately, rather than leaving it to chance.”
“What about some kind of biofeedback?” Nina said. They looked at her, and she continued. “I know a guy doing cutting-edge research on the use of biofeedback to regulate organ function. We should be able to borrow equipment from him.”
“Biofeedback?” Bell grinned. “Yes, yes, a portable biofeedback setup might work as a basis for the type of machine that we would need. We’d need to find a way to synchronize our alpha waves and link our minds together during the trip, so that we can concentrate on holding the gate open long enough to force the killer through.”