The girl pounded on the door again. "You better come
McDonald approached the door, hesitated then asked Mills, "Should I open it?"
Mills cracked a grin that resembled that of a sadistic clown's. "Sure, step right on in. Let's see what the treatment does to you." Mills's eyes were closed, and he leaned back from the computer keyboard like Captain Nemo playing a demented organ melody.
"Ah, I can see it," Mills said. "I knew I could do it. See, McDonald you and your Trust thought I was wrong, that 1 was used up and broken. You were ready to throw me away, but you need me. I'm the only one who can make it happen."
"Don't keep me in the dark on this thing," McDonald said. "Kracowski made tons of notes. Why do we have to keep guessing with you?"
"Kracowski wants other people to know what a genius he is. All I want is to find out for myself."
Mills opened his eyes as if finishing a prayer, then altered the programming. "See, Kracowski, you don't need to shock them if you want to kill them. Kill them and let their hearts keep beating. That's the way to get inside the dead."
Kracowski had administered death in doses that lasted for fractions of seconds. Mills appeared capable of killing millions without hesitation. After what he'd done to his own wife and son, Kracowski wouldn't be surprised if the man would wipe out the entire human race just to prove himself right. Mills would even kill God if he had the means and opportunity. He already had the motive.
"Take a look for yourself," Mills said. "It's beautiful. Dead is beautiful."
Kracowski looked at the readings on the computer screen. The amplitude was erratic, scrambled into a wave pattern he'd never seen before. Not even the radical physicists, those who linked electromagnetism with UFOs and world war and brain cancer and killer viruses, had directly connected the silent radiation with the human spirit. Mills was pushing it with no idea what the result would be, playing a guessing game that might be far more tragic than the splitting of an atom.
Even nuclear reactions obeyed the laws of nature, and Mills was playing in the field beyond nature.
Kracowski cursed himself for not being able to look away. He was just as curious as Mills.
"Open the door," he heard himself saying.
McDonald put a hand on the thick handle of the slide lock. He eased the lock free and winced, as if expecting the walls to fly loose from the floor. When nothing happened, he took hold of the door handle. He paused, then knelt to the slot in the door, pulling the rusty mechanism where food had long ago been shoved to the cell's inhabitants.
Vicky's voice came from the slot, louder than before. "They're eating the light," she said, the words made even more haunting by her calmness.
Mills laughed. "Dark tastes better. Less filling. Don't have to make yourself vomit after."
McDonald said "What the hell's going on in there?"
Mills traced a strange pattern in the air with the tip of his finger. Painting an invisible Picasso, or maybe conducting a frenzied Phillip Glass piece for full orchestra. Communing with fleshless things. Or stroking the molecules of heaven.
"Damn you," McDonald said to Mills. "Talk to me, or I'll have your ass stuck back in the loony bin."
The agent worked the lever on the food slot and peered inside the cell. Kracowski wondered if McDonald would be able to see anything because of the darkness. McDonald shook his head as if trying to clear his vision, then pressed his head closer to the slot. He squealed in sudden pain, as if acid had been dashed in his eyes, and rolled to the floor.
McDonald huddled with his knees against his chest and moaned unintelligible syllables. He shuddered, eyes fixed open, staring past Mills and Kracowski. Mills hurried around the computer table and grabbed the man by the jacket, shaking him. "Help me get him away from the fields," he said to Kracowski.
Kracowski glanced at the computer screen, where the resonance image of Vicky's brain flashed in bright purple, green, and gold, the colors one saw when pressing fingers against closed eyelids. An infrared video camera depicted an aurora surrounding her body. Other cloudlike shapes flickered against the darkness, clusters of energy that weren't connected to the girl's physical form.
"What did you see?" Mills shouted at McDonald spittle flying into the dazed man's face.
"Nuh-nuh-nuh," he grunted in reply.
Mills pushed McDonald to the floor. He shouted at Kracowski, "Don't touch anything. I'm going in."
Mills yanked the cell door open. But he didn't go in. He couldn't. -
The room was gone.
Kracowski forgot the computer, the straining machinery, the burning fear in his stomach, the hopeless sense that everything was too far out of his control, because none of that mattered. In the face of a miracle, even the extraordinary was meaningless.
FORTY-THREE
Freeman was with Vicky, bridged, as the floor disappeared beneath her feet in the cell. The darkness of the small room gave way to gray as the writhing shapes appeared like an invading army on the horizon. Faces stood out among the coalescence, sets of eyes that had seen as much horror in death as in life. Faint fingers clawed the air, tongues and teeth gnashed in silent anger.
Ghost bedlam. These spirits had shouted their broken words against the cell walls, painted their pain in the stone and steel and concrete of the basement, bounced their mad thoughts against the unyielding fences of reality. These were the patients who had been damned and doomed to live out their confused lives in the narrow basement rooms. Now they were forever committed to Wendover's regiments of the dead.
Freeman couldn't blame them for being angry at those who had disturbed their slumbering escape from this vicious world.
"They're eating the light," Vicky said.
"I know," Freeman said. He felt the vibration as she pounded on the cell door.
"Kracowski's machines brought them back. Here where they hurt the most."
"They're still lost, though. Listen…"
Outside Vicky's cell came a roar like a metallic tidal wave. The other cell doors in the basement had yanked themselves open and slammed against the walls. Either the magnetic force had pulled the doors from their locks or the rooms' former inhabitants were staging a massive jail-break.
Disconnected and mad thoughts spilled into the open line that existed between him and Vicky, a triptrap with the spirits that froze the inside of Freeman's skull like a hundred hits of ice cream. He recognized some of the voices from his earlier journey into the deadscape, but familiarity didn't make them any less insane. He tried to block them, but they came regardless:
Notes in the television, doctor.
I am a tree and I leave.
Crazy as a bugbed.
A white, white room in which to write.
Freeman focused on Vicky again as the shapes drew closer. "What do they want?" she thought at him, inside him.
"Maybe they're just coming back because they don't have anywhere else to go. Maybe these cells were all they ever had, the closest thing to home. Sad as it sounds, maybe they belong here."
"Don't be scared."
"I'm not scared," Freeman thought.
"Look, I told you, you can't lie to somebody who's reading your mind."
The spirits closed in, drawn by the invisible field, their eyes glittering, mouths gasping for air they couldn't breathe. Freeman thought about breaking the bridge, pulling away from Vicky, and shutting off those crazy dead voices. Then he felt ashamed for his selfishness, and linked to her again with all his concentration.
The ghosts were so close that their cold mist shrouded Vicky, the impossible flesh giving off a faint effervescent light. The endless darkness around them and behind them grew even blacker, as if drawing energy from the stray photons in the basement.