She didn’t say anything. Gary spoke. “Bethany, what’s your name?”
“Batne?” the girl said.
Then she patted the dog one more time, a little too hard, and went running away up the path.
The video froze abruptly, then went to black.
“Very fucking sweet,” I said. “But—”
“Wait a second,” Gary interrupted. “You had to see that. But this is the thing.”
The image on the television’s screen changed again, flipping from pure black to a kind of mottled purple. Some kind of view in very low lighting conditions.
As my eyes got used to the dim light, I figured out that the glow came from a bedside night-light and that a collection of paler dots in the middle of the frame was a mobile, dangling animal shapes twisting slowly. I was looking into a child’s bedroom, in the dark.
“What the—”
“Please just watch,” Gary said.
The camera remained motionless for a while, evidently positioned in a hallway outside the room. I realized I could hear the sound of its operator breathing, trying to do so as quietly as possible.
Then the camera moved in a series of slow steps, as the person holding it stepped into the bedroom and then back and to the side. There was a quiet swishing sound and then a click. The image got even darker.
The camera panned slowly and unsteadily around the room. A faint, cold light through drapes showed shadowy, grainy images of a jungle mural on the wall, a baby-size chair and table, an orderly collection of toys stowed in a shelving unit. The view turned in a complete circle to pass the door, now closed, and ended back on the area made lighter by the clock. Looking down into a child’s bed.
The bed had bars on all sides, a crib designed for someone not yet old enough to be allowed to traverse the world under his or her own steam. You could make out the shape of the sleeping child within. Hear it, too, the slow rise and fall of its breathing.
Nothing happened for a couple of minutes. You could tell that the camera was still capturing the scene in real time, however, because of the quiet sounds of two people breathing and the noise of the image as the camera tried to cope with the near darkness.
This wasn’t anywhere enough to hold my attention. I was just about to get up when I heard something very quiet out of the television speakers.
“What was that?” I said.
Gary held his hand up, gesturing me to keep silent.
On-screen, the camera changed position. It moved quickly back from the bed, around to the side, and dropped a couple of feet. From here it had a view between a couple of the bars, of the side of a baby girl’s head.
I leaned forward, peering at the murky screen.
Nothing for a moment. Then the noise came again. It was a long, drawn-out sigh. From its quality it was obvious it hadn’t come from the person operating the camera—Gary, I assumed. Nothing for maybe another minute. Then, out of the speakers, very quietly:
“I don’t know.”
I blinked. I knew what I thought I’d just heard. There was silence again for fifteen, twenty seconds.
“Can anybody hear?”
This time there was no doubt. The words sounded strained, unevenly inflected. The child’s eyes were shut. Her body was motionless.
And she was two years old.
“Go ’way,” she said then, and this time her voice did sound right, the words vague and unformed.
“No,” the other voice said, still coming out of Bethany’s mouth. “I’m going nowhere.”
The child suddenly turned on her side, toward the camera. The motion was angry.
The operator caught his breath, evidently afraid she was going to wake, see him, and wail the place down.
But her eyes did not open. There was the very faint sound of crying, the child’s chest rising and falling more rapidly.
“I can wait,” the voice said.
Then the girl turned quickly onto her back again. There was another long sigh, and she went quiet. A moment later the screen flicked to black.
I turned to Fisher.
“Play it again.”
He rewound the tape. At no point was there a perfect view of the child’s mouth at the same time as the voice was audible. It was too dark in the room, and her face was generally at least partially obscured by the bars of the crib. But it was hard to believe that the voice had been dubbed in afterward—it shared too much of the same quality as the background sounds of breathing. Even harder to ignore was the way the child turned over at the end. There was something adult about it, fast, bad-tempered. Did children move like that?
I didn’t know. I hit PAUSE and froze the tape on the image of Bethany lying in her crib.
“How does this relate to Amy?”
He stared at me. “You’re kidding, right? I even got the name for them from you. From your book.”
“Name for what?”
“You’ve just heard one, Jack. Heard its voice, coming out of my baby’s mouth.”
I stared at him. “You think someone’s inside your child?”
“Not just her. Don’t you get it?” He leaned forward, his eyes sparking with inner light. “They’re the intruders, Jack. They’re the people inside.”
chapter
THIRTY-FOUR
There’s a feeling you get to be very familiar with as a policeman. The realization that the person you’ve been talking to has, all this time, been lying. It might be something big, could just be some small detail. But suddenly you understand that the world he’s been describing, with plenty of eye contact and the apparent desire to be helpful, is simply not real.
I didn’t think Gary was lying. But otherwise it felt the same. You want neurosis to be heroic, to confer a shamanic majesty upon the tangled and pathless inner landscape some people are unable to escape. It isn’t. There is no upside. It’s just bitterly sad.
He saw the way I was looking at him. “No, Jack. You just saw it, right there on the screen.”
“I saw a child sleeping. I heard some words.”
“Some of which she is not capable of saying.”
“Some part of your kid’s brain has gotten ahead of itself, Gary. That’s all. It’s practicing in downtime. Talking in your sleep is no big deal. Amy did it for a while. Back when she was a kid, and recently.”
Gary smiled in a strange, overconfident way. “Really.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Explain Mozart to me, Jack.”
“Excuse me?”
“The guy was composing at four, yes, and we all know this, but instead of pointing out how fucking freaky it is, we just say, ‘Cool, how super smart he must have been.’ But how could that possibly work—unless he came into the world with a flying start?”
“Are you talking about reincarnation, Gary?”
“No. This is not an individual coming back into a new body. This is when you have two people inside the same mind.”
“You think Bethany has an additional person in her head.”
“I know it. And who it is.”
“For God’s sake—you told me you didn’t believe that crap about Donna. I thought you were just drunk.”
“You didn’t watch me carefully enough that evening,” he said. “I didn’t finish half my beers. I don’t drink much anymore. I’m too smart for that.”
“Right. Sure. Whatever. And what exactly does this have to do with my wife?”
“Joe Cranfield had an intruder, too, Jack. He was the intruder, in fact, the older personality roosting in the body of the person I met. This is why Cranfield was able to hit the ground running. A financial prodigy, yes? A Mozart of music. He’s what clued me in to the whole thing in the first place. That’s why he cleared his estate at the end, without warning his wife—who wasn’t an intruder and so didn’t know the score. That’s got to be part of the system. The way these people work.”