It was a sight to make you gulp.
For a briefest instant, his whole head flared—or appeared to—a spectrum aura radiating outward, expanding until the triangular room was filled with its variegation, driving away the blackness and forcing me and Midge to shield our eyes.
But not before we'd both perceived other worlds inside those subtle and lifting rainbow colors, floating planets that resembled body cells, stars and suns that shone green, blue, the deepest mauve, shapes that were sometimes human and sometimes vast expanses of protoplasmic masses, a coagulation of life forces. We experienced the lonely darkness of infinite space, which was the pitch umbra of time itself, both casts of the same nonentity; we felt huge tides of shifting emotions sweeping through those gossamer galaxies, shaping destinies and creating forces that would become rock and flesh and more emotion, emotion being the creative energy that bred with itself, the source of everything, the progenitor of all we knew and all we didn't know.
And at the center of this revelation we saw a whiteness that would have seared our eyes had it been real; and it was this, not the brightness inside the room, that caused us to cover our faces.
But all this was only a glimpse, no more than that. A glimpse allowed by Mycroft.
We cowered, and the vision was gone.
Darkness came back with the smell of foul incense.
I shook my head dazedly, more wearied than alarmed; there was a peculiar sensation in my stomach, as if there were a shining down there, something alight and warming my veins. The heat surged into my limbs, to my fingertips and toes, then vanished, dissipated through them.
I shifted over to Midge, not sure I wanted to stand just yet. Mycroft, returned to normal self, the light beams rigid posts once more, watched impassively, an entomologist studying a specimen beetle who struggled with a pin stuck in the shell of its back.
"Midge? Midge, are you okay?"
Her hands were still held to her face, and I gently pulled them away. She blinked, seemed not to recognize me, and I caught sight of the white light still twinkling in her pupils, but distant, diminishing, finally snuffing out. She looked past me, at Mycroft, and her smile was tentative, unsure.
I turned and his visage remained impassive.
"What was it?" Midge asked in a small breathless voice.
I expected a profound answer from the Synergist, but he only smiled enigmatically.
"Yeah, I'd like to know too," I said.
"You were spectators to the mysteries."
Pretty profound.
"That doesn't tell us much."
"What do you feel you saw?"
It was Midge who replied. "I felt I was witnessing the source of all things, but it was incomplete, only a fragment."
He nodded slowly (and a little too sagely, I thought, like it was part of the show). "A vision only of a glimmer. Nothing more than that. Your imagination rendered the truth into a vision your mind could perceive—but only just. At such moments sight can be as useless as words, imagination as inadequate as reason. Even dreams can barely sense the Unity."
Whatever, it had given me a headache. "A nice display, Mycroft, but what was it for? To impress us?"
"Perhaps."
"We're impressed. Now can we leave?"
"You let us see your power," said Midge, leaning forward eagerly.
"I revealed a channel to power, one that courses through my own body and mind," Mycroft replied. "There are other . . . stronger channels around us that can be sought and found. Access points, conduits—call them what you will. They can be used . . ."
He suddenly clammed up and avoided our eyes. I think he'd been getting carried away by his own genius.
"I don't understand what you want from us," I persisted. "We're not interested in becoming Synergists, or anything like this . . ."
"I think your partner is," he came back, mysterious as ever.
"Find them for me again," Midge said to him. "Let them speak to me. Let Mike hear for himself."
We both knew whom she meant.
I touched her hand. "This is madness. Can't you see what he's doing? Thought projection, mind manipulation, plain old-fashioned hypnotism—it's all part of the same thing. Nothing really happened. Mycroft is making us see all these things, they're not real—"
"Their presence is in the room," interrupted Mycroft. "I can sense them, and so can you." He was addressing Midge.
"Yes," she said simply.
"They've more to tell you."
She nodded.
"They want you to listen."
She nodded again, and her eyes closed.
And now I could feel something else inside that room. But I wasn't sure if it was because Mycroft wanted me to.
"They're speaking," said Midge in a hushed voice.
"I can't hear anything." My own voice was a whisper.
A breeze stirred around us.
"They're faint, but they're here." Midge opened her eyes again.
I noticed Mycroft's were boring into hers. Then he turned his attention to me and his pupils were like tiny black holes, bottomless but not empty.
There was a shadow behind him. Gray and wispy, and moving forward. Another behind that one, appearing just beyond his left shoulder. Both taking on shimmering form.
Voices, an eternity away. So faint. From another dimension. Yet not voices at all. Thoughts that pressed into ours.
"Father?" said Midge.
One of the flimsy clouds at Mycroft's shoulder shifted as if stirred by an air current. And the thought in my mind answered her.
The breeze became a gust.
"Show Mike that you're really here." It was a plea from Midge.
The nebula took on more form: a vaporous head, a line of a shoulder. It became almost liquid, rippling as features shaped themselves. Those features slowly grew familiar to me, although they remained wavery and indistinct.
A word insinuated itself into my mind:
". . . Trust . . ."
But I didn't want to trust, because it was telling me to put my faith in Mycroft, this hazy spirit of Midge's dead father was telling me to believe in the Synergist, and I didn't want to because I knew he was a charlatan, that he had a purpose for Midge, but I didn't know what that purpose was, and I was going to resist, resist, I was going . . .
My incredulous gaze was drawn to the second fluid shape hovering there by Mycroft's other shoulder and it, too, was familiar, a face from photographs shown to me by Midge many times in the past, and she, this ghost of a woman, told me the same:
". . . trust . . . in . . . him . . ."
Midge was on her knees, reaching toward them, her upturned face fresh with its own glow despite the surrounding dimness, and I held her back, one arm around her shoulder, my other hand clenching her wrist; but still she shuffled forward, and it was toward Mycroft that she moved, on her knees, a cripple toward a faith healer, a follower toward her high priest.
For one fleeting moment his concealing mask fell away, his resolve failing as he indulged in the pleasure of triumph.
I caught that jubilant glint and something clicked inside my head, like a fingernail tapping on the window of my brain, warning me to accept none of this. These ghosts were just vapors, with no form and no thoughts.
"It's a trick!" I yelled at Midge, dragging her down so that we both sprawled at Mycroft's feet. "That isn't your parents! He's making us see them!"