A plane.
And a signpost.
She knows this.
But doesn’t. It’s familiar, but she can’t quite place it.
One objective almost figured out. Regardless of the uncertainties and ambiguity surrounding Orlando and his… neighbor.
One down.
Now, check the twins…
Had to let her instincts take over and spy on them, but they had the sphere that blocked her sight. It was agonizing, and she had to peek around the edges to get a glimpse of anything at all. But it was there, and she found it.
She swooned, almost fell — and screamed.
Minutes later, images of impossible sights swirling in her head, she stumbled out of her office and made her to way to Caleb.
He may have been in his own deep session, remote viewing something, or preparing to address and calm the world as best he could, but when he saw her ashen face, he came to her.
“What is it? You saw something.”
“I might know where Orlando is. But the twins…”
She almost sobbed out the words.
“They’re in danger, I can feel that much, even though I don’t know from what, and I can’t see… not a damn thing that made any sense. I don’t know how to help them.”
“What could you see?”
She gasped for breath, still seeing images of smoke, fire and a towering man in red storming through burning wreckage. “More than just the physical danger. Somebody’s got them — or is about to. But before, they…”
“What?” His voice was soothing, his touch gentle but firm.
“They’re not like any of us. They…” She clenched her eyes and could see it again, just one sight, but it was like something out of a Michelangelo canvas sprinkled with faerie magic and illuminated by angelic finger-paint.
“I saw something else. I think it was a scene from Genesis.”
Caleb made a choking sound. “Genesis?” His eyes widened, like he saw it too. “The Tree?”
“They were floating or flying around it. Touching it with elastic beams of light, like they were consuming its branches. Drinking from its leaves, absorbing its sap.”
Caleb took a step back, and she knew his mind was whirling, interpreting, merging this data with a dozen myths and folk tales and modern science.
“The Akashic Record? Or maybe…”
“It’s the Biblical Tree of Wisdom itself.” She took a deep, deep breath. “They can open it up, read it all. No serpent or apple needed.”
Caleb thought for a moment, then swallowed hard. “I’m worried that whoever can control those children…”
“…can know everything?” Phoebe again saw the man in crimson, with his flowing cape, striding through the smoke and wreckage.
“He can become God.”
9
After fishing out the keycard from the dead administrator’s pocket, and after closing those vacant, horrific eyes, Orlando scanned the pass and opened the door. He stepped out into the hallway, which was dimly lit now by weak bulbs and an intermittently spinning red alarm that fortunately had no audible accompaniment.
Where am I?
To his left there were numerous other doors, a few open, and otherwise just stretching out into the gloom. Movement down there, like something shuffling in the shadows, hugging the walls. To the right, a body with a pair of scissors in its neck, blood all over the floor and the white coat.
Was that the other guy from my room?
He headed in that direction. Screams from somewhere, muffled and lonesome. A pleading voice from behind a door up ahead.
“Make it stop, make it stop…”
Orlando peeked at the window in the first door, finding an empty room, but in the next… a woman with a shaved head, wearing just a patient smock. Indeterminate age, gaunt features, haunted eyes.
She had a crayon in her hand, red, and had apparently been using it as a lipstick and makeup applicator, giving her face a Joker-like makeover. Orlando was about to move on when he saw on the walls behind her, flickering in the overhead radiance, his name, ORLANDO, written over and over.
Her red lips parted wide, displaying crimson-stained teeth.
“Waiting for you. Waitingforyou…”
His flesh crawled, and suddenly, seemingly without even rising, she was up and at the other side of the door, face pressed to the glass. The crayon coloration smeared on the pane as she screamed, “We’re all waiting!!”
He backed away, then moved on, quickly. Flinched as he passed the next door. Something thudded hard on the other side. The shock pushed him to the opposite side of the hallway, to a larger door — and a keycard reader.
A short distance away, a plump woman in a lab coat rounded the darkened corner. She was absently pulling out her hair and mumbling to herself. She saw Orlando, then retreated into the shadows.
“Hey…” He croaked. He wanted answers, needed to know what was happening here. And where ‘here’ even was, but something (besides the flashing lights) shouted a warning.
Get somewhere safe first.
This door had no window but did have a sign: ADMINISTRATION-LEVEL 4.
Let’s hope wrist-slasher has access.
He scanned the card… and the door whisked open, admitting him to a large control center with several workstations and a whole lot of flat screen monitors. A little brighter in here, and antiseptic. The only thing out of place next to the server banks, computers and peripheral equipment was a calendar with a cuddly pair of kittens on the nearest cube wall.
Otherwise, empty.
The screens showed various levels of the facility: hallways and rooms, and larger warehouse areas, a loading bay and an outdoor driveway leading up what looked like a hillside entrance. One screen was just set on CNN.
He stepped in as the door eased shut behind him. He didn’t see the movement on the upper right monitor, where a door on the hall he had just explored opened and a blurry shape, long haired and clown-ish, slid out.
Caught up in the images on the news, he reached for a remote, pointed it at the CNN screen and increased the volume. The banner read: Dangerous visions and psychic phenomena sweep the globe.
He stared, open mouthed at the scenes of rioting, looting, of hospitals overflooding, and then watched as doctors and scientists struggled to talk coherently, at a loss to explain the mass-introduction of what seemed to be waking dreams. Hallucinations, visions, some impossibly true, others fantastic and frightening. As if the floodgates had opened and everyone’s brains were just exploding with sensory overload.
He shook his head and pulled his thoughts back. To the present, to Caleb, Phoebe… where were they? Last he knew they were fleeing the crackdown at Stargate, the roundup that led to his imprisonment and experimentation down here. To them doing god-knows-what to him.
But you know, don’t you?
He knew what they’d done to him. Knew what he’d become. An ideal candidate, they’d described him. They allowed him, in that astral-Matrix-like state, to access the prior histories, the other ‘candidates’, the other Custodians.
I was one of them…
And, he groaned, doubling over with a massive, sudden headache, I still remember.