He noticed a little jolt in the scene, as if a single image had been clipped out of a strip of film. He took it to be a signal from a receiver, but not just any receiver. It could only be coming from Katherina – he could tell.
The moment Jon read the flashback scene, a brilliant blue spark leaped out and crept up his black robe like a snake, only to leap to the nearest light fixture many metres overhead. Those who were standing closest took a step back in alarm, and a worried murmur arose. Remer raised his arms to make a reassuring gesture.
'It's okay,' he said loudly. 'This is what we've been waiting for.'
The uneasiness died down and the transmitters who had stopped reading resumed, though with a certain hesitation. Katherina could see that many people were looking anxiously around, and for safety's sake some moved further away from the dais.
Jon continued to read, undaunted, without taking any notice of what was happening around him. His voice was calm, composed and enticing as he presented the story. This seemed to soothe the audience, even as small sparks flickered over his robe.
Katherina looked around feverishly. What had happened to the others? If Mehmet and Henning didn't turn up soon and stop the ritual, the reactivation would become a reality. She could feel it. The whole atmosphere around her was smouldering with energy, the flames of the candles had begun to flicker even though there was no wind inside the reading room and she thought that it suddenly felt colder. Katherina had no doubt that something was about to happen. The question was: what?
The people in the audience who weren't reading stared as if mesmerized by the phenomenon before them. With so many receivers present, and all of them pulling in the same direction, there was nothing Katherina could do. She sensed that Jon's performance was being carried forward on a wave, partly by the library's ancient forces, partly by the support of both transmitters and receivers. To go against the flow here would be like trying to stop a tsunami with a paper bag.
Katherina closed her eyes. The only thing she could do was let herself be carried along, so she focused on Jon's presentation. There was a feeling she recalled from their training sessions, which now seemed an eternity ago. He had a special way of accentuating what he presented, a very special pulse of energy that she would recognize no matter where it occurred. She noticed how most of the receivers had already tuned in to precisely that pulse and were supporting its every beat.
Maybe she shouldn't try to stop him?
She opened her eyes and looked up at the podium. Jon's body stood as motionless as a statue, and only the sound of his voice and the movement of his lips revealed he was even conscious. His robe was like a canvas on which the sparks briefly formed complicated patterns, and Katherina began to see a connection between the frequency of the patterns and the pulse of Jon's energy. By focusing on both what she saw and on the powers, Katherina picked up a sense of the rhythm and could quickly predict where the next discharge would occur. She took a deep breath and waited.
With great mental exertion she shoved Jon's next pulse one notch higher. She noticed an enormous leap in the energy and a violent electrical discharge instantly shot out from Jon's body to one of the lamps hanging overhead. Sparks flew at the impact and drifted down over the audience like glowing snowflakes.
People standing around Katherina instinctively moved back. A few ran away, but most remained there, transfixed by the phenomenon occurring before them and by the irresistible force of the story. They couldn't have left the room if they tried, and they paid no attention to what was happening around them.
In the torrent of images coming from Jon, Katherina suddenly received a glimpse of herself.
It was like a picture from a slide show that was tossed into the scene, almost too brief to catch, but she was positive it was her. Jon had sensed that she was present, and it had broken his concentration. She instantly focused all her powers on loading those same images, and more of them began to appear. Images of them in Libri di Luca, in Kortmann's garden, together in bed, and a glimpse of her in profile against the window of a car. Katherina didn't hesitate to enhance the emotions of longing, love and security in the fragments that turned up.
It didn't take long before she sensed a response. Slowly the images appeared again, filled with a warmth and ardour that was coming from Jon, not her. She could feel tears running down her cheeks. Had she managed to reach him?
Maybe it was wishful thinking, but she seemed to see a change in Jon's posture. It looked as if he was trying to turn his head but was being held back.
Katherina took a step forward, but stopped abruptly.
Remer had changed position. His body was more erect than before, almost frozen solid, and he was staring down at the text without blinking even once. It was as if he no longer had any sense of where he was or what was happening around him. But what frightened Katherina most were the dark little sparks flickering over his white robe.
40
The moment Jon realized Katherina was present in the room and was trying to communicate with him, he was overwhelmed by memories. Images of them together kept turning up in his thoughts and were impossible for him to ignore. He remembered that they had been happy, that he had felt happier than ever before, and slowly a desire began to emerge to find his way back to that joyful state. The reading continued, but he was using less time on charging the text so he had the reserves to think back. What was it that had separated them?
In his mind he pictured the test at the school when he had sent her away so that she wouldn't be harmed. The helplessness he had felt then resurfaced; with a jolt, he remembered Poul Holt reading to him for the first time, and how he had at last surrendered.
It was as if he were awaking from a nightmare.
What was it he was in the process of doing here?
Jon tried to stop the reading, but he couldn't. Someone was holding him in place, just as Katherina had done when she demonstrated her powers as a receiver for the first time in Libri di Luca. One of the people was Patrick Vedel, he could feel that, but he wasn't the only one. All Jon could do was keep reading, but he became more aware of how he was accentuating the text.
The main character was still in the cemetery. He had begun his soliloquy to the black headstone in front of him. Jon let greyish black clouds drift in over the valley where the cemetery lay, and the stones around him assumed a raw and filthy appearance. He could feel the weight of the earth beneath the main character, dark and damp, filled with worms ploughing their way through the mould under the grass.
Jon's attention was caught by a patch of greyish fog off to his right. He stared at the phenomenon. So far he'd had total control over the scene; he knew the shape of every single headstone, knew how each blade of grass lay and how it moved. But this grey fog he was unable to steer. It changed, growing denser in some areas, dissolving in others, and soon he could distinguish the outline of a person. He tried to make the wind blow the figure away, but it stood firm and became more and more solid. A ghost? The setting fit, but there were no ghosts in the text, and this was not something that he himself was adding.
It started out as a hazy human shape, but the molecules suddenly rearranged themselves and with one stroke the figure became as solid as a statue. The details of the face were the last to fall into place, and then there was no longer any doubt in his mind.
Jon had never considered the possibility that he, as the Lector, might be part of the scene he controlled. He had regarded his role as that of an outsider who influenced the presentation in the same way a film editor does at the editing table. When he saw this manifestation of Remer, Jon realized that he himself had to be somewhere in the world framed by the text. He was unable to glance down at himself to confirm this personally, but it seemed clear to him that the moment when the energy discharges began was the moment he had crossed the threshold and entered the space of the story. That explained the feeling he had had of being liberated from his physical body.