“And if we don’t?”
“Uh, we—”
“Say it!”
Moss and Parmenter exchanged another look. Parmenter faced up to it. “If we don’t find an alternative, then the only way to reset the Machine and clear the deflection debt is to retrace Mandy … and she will burn to death all over again.”
There was nowhere else to go and, from some inkling of intuition she couldn’t explain but opted to trust, she knew something was brewing back at the hospital; she knew someone was there in that basement behind those big double doors who might not be glad to see her but was going to see her, like it or not, live or die.
She parked her VW in the visitor parking and, rather than risk being seen, remained inside the car, relaxing, immersing herself in the space around her, the streams, currents, ripples, and folds of other times and places. It was still a bizarre feeling, as easy as ever to mistake for madness or, at best, a dream state, but she’d grown used to it, even mastered it to the point that she could judge when she was “on,” really in tune with it, or maybe a little “off,” not quite finding her way. Tonight she was “on,” wayon, as if the layers of time and space were rose petals emanating in graceful arcs from a center, and she was very near, almost inside, that center. Finding, connecting, slipping through were easy, and in mere seconds she was there, in that alternate, overlaid space that took her from her VW to a subterranean hallway she’d visited before.
The rushing, invisible current grabbed at her again and would have carried her down the hall, but she was ready for it and planted her feet solidly on the tiles. Clunk! She was in the hall for real …
… and face-to-face with the steel double doors. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!
Immediately she felt it: terror was coming through that steel and knifing through her as if she were already on the other side wishing she could get out. Her feet wouldn’t move, not toward the doors, not away from them. It was like standing at the top of her first escalator when she was four: she was frozen.
But that made her angry. Mandy Whitacre, you’re not four. You’re not even twenty. You’ve been through enough, been bruised enough, been scared enough, you’reold enough. Now you can either wimp out on this side of the doors until the dragon comes out and eats you anyway, or you can go in there, kill it, and be done with it.
So that resolved that. She straightened her spine and held her head up. “I’m Mandy Whitacre,” she told the doors, and with one quick reach into a quaking, tea-stained other world, she let the doors suck her in, pulling her body through the metal like a string of taffy.
She went spinning, all things around her blurring, she groped for the veil, the way out …
Clunk! She fell out on the other side, standing in a featureless hallway lit by can lights in the ceiling. There was that deep, electric hum again, so often a part of her other visions and journeys. She heard no voices, saw no one.
The fear would not go away. She sequestered it in a pocket of her mind, drew a deep breath, and took the first step. Other steps followed the first. She moved down the hall.
A steel door on her left taunted her with a big cold handle and red letters that shouted with authority, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY—just like Don’t go out on the casino floor, you’re underage!“Oh, shush!” The latch clacked open for her and she ventured a peek inside.
She’d seen this place. It was a furnace room, a maze of water and steam pipes, aluminum ducts, catwalks and stairs all built around a furnace the size of a mobile home, and alongside the furnace, an iron box like a woodstove on a brick pedestal with a control panel and a heavy front door. She descended a flight of steel stairs and approached it, gripped the big handle, and creaked the door open. Inside was a gas-fired combustion chamber lined with ashes. An incinerator. This was where the monkeys burned.
One more proof I’m not crazy,she thought. A new boldness pushed the fear farther back inside her.
Double doors on the other side of the hallway looked like hospital doors that could lead to a ward or operating rooms. They didn’t appear to be bolted shut; they were unmarked. She crossed the hall, pressed against the door on the right … it swung open. She stepped through.
In the first few seconds she was overwhelmed. It could have been a television studio with a stage built in the center, or a space flight control room with the launch pad in the middle. The room was about forty by forty with a high ceiling, windowless, all concrete, lit by fixtures suspended from an overhead grid like a soundstage. Rows of control consoles with dials, switches, keyboards, and monitors were arranged on three sides of the room, all facing the center, where a hexagonal enclosure of steel and glass about twelve feet across stood like a space-age gazebo, steel pillars at each corner, a flat canopy rigged with lights over the top. Electrical cables snaked from the platform across the floor, some taped down, some not, connecting the platform with every console, every steel cabinet marked DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE, every blinking panel.
For the next few seconds, she was stunned speechless and immobile.
On the right side of the room was a large console raised higher than the others, apparently the command control center. Behind that console, face illumined with blue light from a monitor, sat the man who’d come into McCaffee’s with a computer and egged her into doing the levitation. Sitting next to him was the younger, Tom Hanks–looking guy she’d seen superimposed in her apartment.
In front of the console, rising to his feet as she came in, his eyes meeting hers unabashedly, was Dane Collins.
At the sight of him the fear left her, carried away in a sigh as her body eased, even teetered from relief. She couldn’t imagine the story to explain why he was here, and where could she begin to tell hers? She could only find strength in the fact that he was here at all.
So in that long, face-reading, eye-meeting stretch of time, the electrons hummed through the cables and consoles, the panel lights blinked but drew no attention, the ventilation system rushed quietly … and no one said a word.
Dane looked up at the steel and glass enclosure, then back at her, his cue for her to take a look.
She walked, her sneakers making little squeaks that carried through the room, then climbed the seven steps to the enclosure for a closer look through the glass. The enclosure contained a bench the size of a hospital bed. The bench was draped with a sheet that hung crookedly over either side, as if arranged in haste. The sheet was soiled, stained brown … with blood?
The smell. It turned her nose, stung her spirit. Like singed hair, rotting flesh, something burning. She’d smelled it in her visions and interdims; she’d smelled it in the scorched car.
The two men exchanged a glance. Dane Collins propped an elbow in the opposite hand, his fingers over his lips, his gaze strong and reassuring.
She descended the steps and walked toward the raised console, reaching into her pocket. Dane turned, and they stood facing the two strangers together. She drew out her hand.
In her palm was the half-melted, ash-encrusted anklet with one dove still intact.
She asked, “What have you done to me?”
chapter
46
Parmenter introduced himself and Moss, but Mandy did not feel cordial and did not offer her hand. He pulled up a chair for her behind the console and offered her some coffee. She requested a bottle of water and sat with Parmenter, Moss, and Dane to hear the other side of her story.
“You have unknowingly been involved in a government-funded experiment …” Parmenter began, and the story unfolded part by part.
“… we’d never tested the process on burn injuries, so your case was an irresistible opportunity …”
“… the bloodstains on the sheet are all that remained. Where you went and how far back your reversion was, we hadn’t a clue …”
“… the massive gravitational influence you have on the Machine is aberrant, totally unexpected …”