Slowly, her eyes still squeezed tightly shut, Sarah nodded. Then she opened her eyes to the sun and struggled to her feet. Spreading her arms wide, she stood there for a moment, then stepped away into the grass and stumbled to her knees.
Jess felt a curious chill creep over her that had nothing to do with the wind. Sarah's face had suddenly gone absolutely smooth and a smile touched her lips as she knelt in the grass.
She bent and grabbed two handfuls and pulled, digging her fingers into the dirt. She rolled on her back and wriggled herself into the earth.
A strange sound the girl made. It took Jess several moments to realize Sarah was crying and laughing at the same time.
The sun slipped behind a cloud. Jess sat on the steps and watched as Sarah sat up and swayed like a snake, eyes closed, cheeks streaked with dirt and tears. "I don't feel too good," she said in a slurred voice.
"They gave you a drug. It's supposed to calm you down. It will make your mouth feel a little dry and your head kind of full. You're going to feel calmer and you might get sleepy."
"I don't like it."
"What happened in there, Sarah?"
She opened her eyes. "Nothing!"
"You mean you don't know, or you don't want to tell me?
"I didn't do anything."
"I don't believe you did anything on purpose. You were scared."
"You weren't there. In the Room. I needed you!"
"If I'd known they were going to bring you to the playroom today, I would have come sooner."
"I looked for you out the window."
"Did you break the glass, Sarah?"
"I don't know! I just wanted to get out!"
"And then what happened?"
"I tried to talk to that boy, to help him. But he wouldn't listen. He started screaming, and he tried to take Connor. Then they came to take me away. You don't know what they do! They grab you hard and they give you shots and tie you up. They take you to the bad place. I didn't want them to do that anymore. So I pushed them. I . . . pushed." Sarah smiled and closed her eyes again, drifting. "I pushed . . ."
"You fought them."
"That's when the glass broke. They made me do it."
"You didn't mean to."
"I'm stronger now. I've been practicing. Do you want to see?
"No, Sarah. I don't want any more fighting. No matter how bad things get, violence is not the answer."
Sarah opened her eyes again. "You don't know anything. I'm not going to let them tie me up. If they try it again I'm going to make them dead."
"Sarah, I know you're angry. You have every right to be. But they're adults, and they're bigger than you. No matter how hard you fight them they're going to win."
Jess saw the man in the guardhouse down the driveway watching them. He raised something to his mouth and spoke into it. Then he stuck it back into his belt and started walking up the driveway.
The gates were shut and the fence ran unbroken around the perimeter of the building. There was no reason they couldn't be out here. Still, for some reason she felt threatened.
The temperature had dropped noticeably. Jess noticed Sarah following her gaze to the guardhouse and the man walking up the drive. She hugged her arms to her chest and rubbed her fingers. "We should go inside now," she said.
"No!" Sarah staggered to her feet, shaking her head. "You lied to me! You don't want to help me at all! You're just like them!" Her face was twitching, its slack, sedated look giving way to something else. She was fighting hard against the drugs coursing through her veins. Jess wondered at Sarah's strength while at the same time she felt her own heart rate increase, the hair on her arms beginning to stand on end. The strange disorientation she had felt during her first visit returned as the temperature around her plummeted still more, as her icy breath plumed around her face.
A shimmering in the air, as behind her she heard a door open; a shout.
She turned through the sudden, drifting mind-fog; saw Wasserman and three others there on the doorstep, two of them in uniform. "Wait!" Wasserman cried, his face bleached white, his lips a purple, bloodless wound. "Get away from her! Get away!"
Jess turned back again through a slow-motion dream. Sarah stood on the lawn under gathering shadow, her arms tight at her sides, her hands balled into fists. Her body trembled as a sudden wind grew and whipped through her hair.
"Get back!" someone else shouted from far away. "She's not under yet!"
The man from the guardhouse started running. The two men in uniform rushed past Jess and jumped at Sarah's trembling, shuddering form. They met, collided, rolling, Sarah's feet drumming the ground as the seizure ripped up and through her.
Darkness met, joined, spread over their heads. A deep rumbling began below their feet.
And then it was as if the very air exploded. Jess threw herself to the ground, covered her head with her arms, as everything around her shuddered and rocked like blows from the fists of a giant.
Cries from the men still on the steps; she looked up, shocked, unbelieving, as something began to fall and the men ran, as the rain of great black stones thundered down on the roof and walls of the Wasserman Facility and shook the earth.
--19--
The familiar larger brick and stone structures that made up the city had long since given way to smaller, private homes by the time Jess Chambers reached the Dorris-Edgecomb Non-denominational Church. Her hands clenched on the wheel as she thought about what she might be giving up by coming here. It was night and the lights were dark, but she had called ahead and she knew they would be waiting for her.
The Church was an old clapboard structure that had once been in the Episcopal fold, before the church board (controlled by several prominent members of the business community and a great deal of money) led a small mutiny and convinced the congregation to go independent. At the heart of the dispute was the church's growing belief in what they called the "new science."
The Organization for the Study of New Science had been on their own and a licensed nonprofit by the state for over ten years now. They were interested in not only the spirituality of man but also man's potential to evolve as a spiritual and physical being, to stretch the boundaries of accepted scientific phenomenon. The OSNS believed in life after death; they believed in man's capacity to overcome. They also believed that the full power of the mind had only begun to be explored.
Jess had learned most of this from Charlie, who had insisted on setting up a meeting for her that very night. She was driving Charlie's car too; another favor insisted upon and finally accepted.
The leaves had turned and the air had a late-fall bite. Stepping from the car, she thought of afternoon walks home from school in Maine, haying time in the fields, apple picking, and wood-burning stoves. For a moment she slipped into the false comfort of memory, and struggled to hold on to the mood, for she did not know when it would come again.
Most of her usual remembrances were filled with drunken neighbors and yapping dogs chained to dirt tracks between mobile homes. The grass would be worn to crackling wisps of spotty brown. Other families would hang their laundry there to dry, until the fall days turned so cold they would go out one morning to find the shirts and socks all frozen stiff and hanging like cardboard from the line.
When she knocked at the big church doors there was no answer. It was not until she moved around to a side entrance that she had any luck. A short, scruffy young man with curly-blond hair and a goatee introduced himself as Ronald Gee. Gee moved as if he were intent on slipping through space with the least possible resistance. He led her through a short hallway to a set of narrow stairs leading down to a white-painted door with a sticker that read psign: we knew you were coming, and a smaller sign that hung from the doorknob, experiment in progress. Music bled faintly through the walls.