The man with no eyes straightened his arms out in front of his body and clapped, as if smashing two cymbals together. A shock wave of some kind knocked me off my feet. I saw Marek, Jean, and Alex go down as well. I sat up, dizzy, struggling to get to my feet again. Jean was on the ground next to me.
I pushed myself up to my knees just as the man with no eyes clapped again. I felt the side of my head strike the concrete. The last thing I saw before everything went black was the circle of varcolacs advancing all around me.
CHAPTER 30
I called Terry Sheppard from prison and told him what I had learned from Peyton, particularly how the police had been given my name by an anonymous caller. Terry doubted it would do any good with the verdict this late in the game, but if new information came to light, he said, it could certainly help with the appeals process. That wasn’t very encouraging, but I left him to it. He said he would track the information down, but I was left with the distinct impression that he wasn’t in a great hurry. It was evening, and I knew there wasn’t much hope of getting any New Jersey state cops assigned to the case on the phone, and not much hope, even then, of getting them to help. They wanted me put away; they weren’t going to admit to anything.
So I was surprised when only two hours later I was pulled out of my cell and brought to meet two visitors. The visitors were Terry and an investigator he had put on the case—introduced only as Bill, someone he said he hired often. Bill apparently knew his business, because he’d already somehow gotten a hold of a recording of the anonymous tipster’s call. They both looked exhausted.
“Looks like you were right,” Terry said. “They did originally act on the basis of a tip. Unfortunately, that fact is not obviously significant to the case, which hangs more on forensic evidence than on eyewitness testimony. If the police had found the tipster, that might just mean they would have one more person to speak against you.”
“But who was it?”
“We don’t know,” said Bill, who looked a little like Terry, but without the mustache. I wondered if they were related. “She didn’t leave a name, and the call was traced back to a pay phone at the Lakehurst Diner Restaurant.”
“She?” I asked, remembering Peyton’s ghost.
“Yes, it was a female caller,” Terry said.
“When did this call come in?”
“2:07 PM. After you found Vanderhall’s body, but before the New Jersey cops connected with the Media cops. Probably about the time you were down in that bunker.”
“Well, can I hear it?” I asked.
“Hear what?”
“The recording of the call.”
“Not much to it,” Bill said. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and pressed a few buttons. A female voice spoke out of it.
“Yes, I’m calling with information about a murder.”
“Can I have your name, please?” asked another female voice.
“It’s about Dr. Vanderhall. He was killed last night, and I saw who did it.”
“Let’s start with your name, please,” the voice said calmly.
“Don’t you want to know who the murderer is?” the caller asked.
“I’d like to know who you are. If you’re afraid, we can protect you, but we can’t protect you if we don’t know who you are.”
“It was Jacob Kelley. He was the murderer.”
“We will certainly look into that. Now, can you tell me your name?”
Bill shut off the recording. “The caller hung up after that. Not much to go on, except that she fingered you for the crime. So it’s probably someone who knows you.”
“I know who she is,” I said dully.
“You recognized the voice?”
“As soon as she spoke,” I said. “Didn’t you recognize it?”
Terry bit his lip and slowly shook his head. “No… though it sounds a bit familiar.”
“It’s Jean Massey,” I said. “Jean Massey is the murderer.”
CHAPTER 31
The blackness swirled, lighter blacks competing with the darker ones. I couldn’t feel any part of my body, but I was still conscious. As my vision cleared, I could see sparks in the darkness, not like stars, which were always far away, but more like fireflies. They were white, tiny, and moved quickly, blinking off and back on again. I tried to track the movement of one, but found that I couldn’t. What were they?
The more I watched, the more I could sense there was a pattern to the movement, and I thought I could discern some meaning in it. Colors. Texture. Temperature.
The constant motion was making me feel sick. I tried to close my eyes, but I found that closing them didn’t make any difference to what I could see. The motion seemed to intensify. The more I watched, the deeper I could see into the cloud of lights, and now I was watching millions or even billions of them. Not only that, but I could see forward and backward in time, as well. I saw that each light was not eternal, but had a lifetime, interacting with other lights, altering their shape and their purpose. In fact—and this came like a jolt of new sight, a pattern coming into focus—the whole constellation of lights was connected. It was a single system.
As soon as I realized that, I saw that this system of lights was just one of many, and that each system had its own span of existence through time. The systems interacted with each other, trading millions of lights among them, composed of different sets of lights from one moment to the next, but still tracing out a continuous path as a single system.
Was this how the varcolac saw the world? What were these systems I was seeing? Humans? The varcolacs themselves? Or were these only the beginnings of more complex ideas? Perhaps the systems I was now perceiving were only cells or bacteria. As this thought occurred to me, my sight leapt to the next level of complexity, and I saw systems of systems, each composed of trillions upon trillions of lights, and I knew that I had not even come close to the end. The concept now in place, my vision jumped back, and back, and back again, perceiving each departure as a new combination of particles, all intertwined, all shared and traded, yet somehow distinct.
Finally, I opened my eyes. At first, I thought I was simply viewing the next level of complexity, the systems upon systems, and I suppose I was. But there was something hard and cold against my face. I had hands again, and legs. I was back in the real world, at least as I understood it. My face was pressed against a concrete floor, and I could see the pebbly, sand-colored surface, feel the rough texture on my cheek and forehead. There was light coming from somewhere above me, and a persistent buzzing sound, like a high-voltage electric fence.
I lifted my head and looked around. I was still underground, somewhere in the accelerator ring structure. It was an enormous, dimly lit, concrete room, and I recognized it. It was a sub-basement below the collider ring, an access room for the electric power coming into the collider from the grid. Thick bundles of cable stretched across the floor, running in different directions and across each other. The bundle that ran right in front of me was thicker than my leg and a riot of different colors, all twisted together. Near the walls, the bundles converged, forming super-bundles that passed into conduit pipes. Banks of switches covered one of the walls, out of reach.
All of the crisscrossing bundles of wire divided the floor into spaces of different shapes and sizes, like a skewed chess board. In many of these spaces were people, one person to a space, lying asleep or unconscious. To my right, I saw Marek and Alex, each in their own spaces. To my left were four more people, the sight of whom made my breathing quicken and my heart rate spike. It was my family—Sean, Claire, Alessandra, and Elena, lying there as if they’d just gone to sleep for the night. None of them was moving, but I could see their chests rise and fall with each breath. They were alive.