“Go on.”
“We were outside the hospital. She became upset, didn’t want to go back inside. There were men there who tried to restrain her, the hospital director as well. It got very dark, very cold—this happened extremely quickly—I don’t know how to say this. Large black rocks—chunks of ice and stones, actually—began to fall from the sky like rain. And it was clear to me that somehow, this girl was causing it to happen.”
There was something almost sacrilegious about saying it in a church. Patrick didn’t seem to notice. He had a way about him that was very serious, very intense. “What did the hospital director have to say after this occurred?”
“Storms had been forecast all day, severe weather warnings. The stones matched the ones used to landscape the hospital grounds. A tornado of some kind, a minicyclone—”
“The ice,” Patrick interrupted. “Did it melt quickly? Were the stones themselves warm?”
“Yes.”
“And the temperature had dropped, you said?” She nodded. Patrick said, “I see.” He pulled out a notepad from his jacket pocket. “Do you mind? It’s easier if I write this down. We’ll go over it later.” He held the notebook in his palm and scribbled something with a stubby end of a pencil. “Hmmm. So the director, he’s asking you to believe that this storm came up out of nowhere, picked up a hailstorm of stones without doing any other damage to the grounds, and dropped them on the roof. Without damaging a single other person or object within a ten-foot radius?”
“I don’t know half of what he said, to be honest. I was pretty shaken up, and I suppose he was too. I don’t know if he believed it himself. But you have to understand that Dr. Wasserman is a man of science.”
“So am I.” Patrick edged slightly closer. She could not look away from his eyes, such strange eyes. “You know how ancient man worshipped the sun as a god because they could not understand the meaning of such a great, shining presence in the sky? Or that before they understood mental illness they believed in possession of the body by spirits?”
“I’m not very good at this, Patrick. If it wasn’t for this girl… you might call me one of your skeptics.”
“I’m only trying to make a point. I want you to entertain for a moment another possibility. This is quite scientific and utterly reasonable. Suppose that there are functions within the mind we have yet to understand. Perfectly rational, explainable abilities if only we knew how the process worked. In some cases these abilities are more advanced, more developed, the same as musical talent or physical coordination. A person might even be able to improve these abilities, strengthen them with practice.”
“I’m listening.”
“The human brain contains over seventeen billion cells. Seventeen billion. These handle approximately one hundred million messages per second. There are many different areas of specialty inside the brain itself, and we understand the functions of a bare fraction. What are these other cells doing? Is it fair to assume that we have no idea? That we cannot even speculate? Look at your airplanes. And yet they’re so primitive compared to what we’ve been given. If you told anyone that you could build a machine with seventeen billion parts and make them all work fluidly together, and explain what each part does and how it does it, do you think they would believe you?”
“Being in here inspires you, doesn’t it?”
“It just serves as a reminder of what a gift we have. And it keeps me humble. There are many mysteries in the universe, and I’ve chosen to focus on just one of them, because to take them all on at once would be impossible.”
They were very close now, knees touching.
Deeper in the shadows above the altar was a life-size statue of Jesus on the cross. Patrick saw her looking at it. “We believe now that he was very likely a sensitive. Certainly telepathic, clairvoyant, quite possibly psychokinetic. It would explain a lot—his knowledge of future events, the power to heal, even walking on water.”
“Rising from the dead?”
Patrick smiled. “We’ve chosen to leave that particular miracle to the imaginations of the parishioners.” He touched the briefcase she still held on her lap. “This girl you’ve told me about, she may have a gift, a portion of the brain more developed than the average person. We’ve studied that here, and we’ve come to a few conclusions based on scientific method. One, these psychic abilities do exist. Two, they follow specific physical rules. And three, they are not as rare as you might think. But they are variable, much like personalities, and for the most part they are minute, measurable only in a laboratory setting.”
“But not always?”
“Stories like yours have been told for centuries. A mother who suddenly has the strength to lift an overturned car. A grandfather clock stopping at the exact moment of someone’s death. A rain of stones. Generally they happen only once or twice in a lifetime, and so it is very hard to document them. A person who can perform at such a high level over time is extremely rare.”
“You asked me if the stones were warm.”
“If you’ll recall from your early physics classes, it takes energy to create motion. If something is being levitated, raised into the air, some force must be accountable for it. What we’ve concluded here—and it’s been documented in South Carolina and other places—is that psychokinesis involves some sort of heat transference at a microscopic level. In any successful PK experiment, the air temperature drops while the surface temperature of the moving object rises.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Neither do we,” Patrick said with a smile. “We don’t understand the process. But what is heat except the movement of molecules? Isn’t it possible that during a psi event, a person is somehow able to borrow motion and energy from moving particles—perhaps at the atomic level—and use that energy to affect a change in the environment?”
“Anything’s possible.” Just don’t ask me to believe in the bogeyman. That would be next, Jess felt suddenly sure; she was careening down a path with no brakes and no map, without even an idea of where she might be at the end. I’ve never believed in anything my eyes couldn’t see. Maybe it was the way I grew up. Maybe it was Michael’s death. But I’ve got to believe the world has a set of rules. And this goes way beyond anything the world has ever shown me.
But that wasn’t really true, was it? Didn’t she know just one split second before Michael ran out in front of that car, wasn’t there a single moment in time where she knew what was going to happen? Or was that just hindsight?
“In your little girl’s case,” Patrick was saying, into the deep and heavy silence of the church, “she would have been pulling heat energy from the air and using it to exert force upon the stones. The resulting temperature drop causes moisture in the surrounding air to form ice almost instantly, even as the stones heat up. How did she do it? It’s difficult to say. There’s been a lot of study lately on brain wave activity and microparticles. But the fact is, we don’t know for sure.”
“Would you take CAT scans in a case like this? MRIs? EEGs?”
“Absolutely.”
Jess touched her briefcase and unsnapped the clasps. With slightly unsteady hands she withdrew the yellow folder. “This is her file,” she said. “What I’ve been allowed to see of it anyway. I’d like you to take a look and tell me what you make of it.”