Patrick took the folder and withdrew the contents, spreading it across his lap. He studied in silence for a few moments, his eyes moving quickly across the pages of notes and reports. Then he held a transparent film up to the flickering light. “Here, you see a slight enlargement of the cerebral ventricles,” he said, pointing at a gray area. “And here. But no visible reduction in the hippocampus or hypothalamus. In fact, I’d say it’s enlarged.”
“In other words, if they were looking for a neurobiological sign of schizophrenia, they didn’t find it.”
“Mmm-hmm. And yet there are abnormalities.”
Suddenly he stood up and went to the candles at the altar, holding the film up to the light and pacing, peering, his voice rising in excitement. “There’s definitely increased activity here. Let me see the rest of it.” He returned and fumbled through the records with more urgency. “You see, look at these readings. The patterns are positively abnormal. Ordinarily you would have a beta wave reading if the person was awake, delta if they were in deep sleep. Occasionally you might see an alpha or even a theta in a state of hypnosis. But in this case it isn’t either, but rather a combination of the two, even when she’s supposedly awake. And in several instances"—he punctuated this with a tap of his long finger on a graph—"there’s a spike, a surge of terrific proportions. It’s as if someone jump-started her brain with a car battery.”
“Have you ever seen anything like it before?”
“Not like this.” Patrick seemed to lose himself for a moment. “I’d heard stories, seen hints, but nothing like this.”
He turned to face her, leaned down, and smacked both hands on the back of the pew. He grinned. “Do you know what you’ve done? If what you’ve told me is true, and these records are accurate? Something we’ve been failing to do for years, with people like Bilecki, thousands of them.”
Patrick clapped his hands together like a child. The sound was like a gunshot in the silent church. “You’ve found us our Holy Grail.”
—21—
Jess Chambers dreams she is in a large, cavernous building. The lights are all off, but emergency bulbs allow her enough light to see. Red light glints off polished metal doorknobs, shines dully from the stone walls, and turns the wooden trim as black as blood.
She pauses to listen. Monsters are chasing her, and she does not know which way they have gone. Paranoia creeps like stealthy dark figures into her mind. She feels them around every corner, watching her from every door frame. She hears them running after her. But she is searching for something, and she cannot leave until she finds it.
Jess hears her mother’s drunken voice echoing through the empty stone corridors; crashing into things, knocking over a lamp that shatters all over the floor, laughing and shouting. Glass tinkles and crunches. Others hissing at her to be quiet. A door opens somewhere close by. The sound of voices becomes very loud. Jess presses herself into a shadowed doorway, listening in a near panic as the footsteps become louder. She has nowhere to go. If they find her they will rake her away and lock her up.
She reaches behind her and turns the knob, stumbling into an open room. White carpet shows bloody footprints leading across a sea of broken and dissected toys, past a toy sink and through a plastic tunnel. Something seems to catch in her throat. What has she been looking for?
She hears a noise over by the bookcase. A little boy stands with his back to her, his blond hair curling over his collar. Both arms are raised and she sees the blood running down his wrists and dripping onto the carpet.
Michael? she says. Her brother turns. Blood pulses from holes in both palms. The look on his face is one of sadness. She sees her mother in him. But something is missing. She does not see any trace of the autism that has plagued him from the moment he was born.
Then the look changes. Suddenly she is afraid. Michael frowns, little furrowed brows coming together in a pantomime of adult emotion. He raises his hands higher. The door swings shut behind her with a bang. Papers pick themselves up off the carpet and whirl through the air. Michael’s shoulders shake, his eyes roll backward into his head.
The plastic tunnel shivers, rocks, lifts into the air. Books slam against the walls and flop like broken birds. Glass shatters in the window with a crack like a lightning storm.
Toys batter her face as a wind picks up and whips through the room. Glass shards flash like little silver arrows in the sun. Fists pound at the door, voices shout her name. She looks at her brother and sees the light of revenge in his eyes. She realizes too late, she hasn’t been running away from them, after all. She has been running away from him.
Miles away, a little girl opens her eyes to inky darkness. Her throat is tight, her limbs slick with sweat. The dream remains with her, of a woman, and a little blond boy, and blood. Lots of blood.
She tries to turn over, but her wrists and ankles are strapped down.
Voices come to her like ghosts now, murmurs in an alien tongue. It is difficult to separate them from the things that happen inside her mind, these other voices that come and go and bring the dreaded gray fog. She isn’t sure right now whether any of them are real, or whether she is truly lost inside herself.
The gray fog is a method of control, a weapon in battle, maybe the only one they have.
She used to think about what might happen if someone came for her. She has only the faintest memories of a woman who might or might not have been her mother. Would this person care for her, would she take her away and soothe the voices, take away the pain? Would someone please, please help?
She knows the woman in the dream she has just had, knows her face. But the truth is frustratingly out of reach. She was here recently. What has happened? Please, remember.
But it does not come. There is only the dream, the terrible, bloody dream.
Her head pulses slowly, throbbing with the pain of a thousand pinpricks. She is lost, and alone, and too weak to move. She lets out a single, choked sob, and lets the gray fog swallow her whole once again.
She keeps her heart jealously guarded, and does not let it beat too loudly for fear that they will hear it.
—22—
Jess awoke into darkness close and cool, got up, and shuffled into the kitchen, hugging herself in the soft tick and hiss of early morning heat as the radiators sputtered to life.
Okay, so suppose Patrick is right. Suppose for one moment that they’re not all off their rockers, that there actually is a portion (where? how?) of the human brain that is capable of exerting an effect on the outside physical world, simply by a particular sequence of thought.
The question then became: where to go from here?
Of course, Patrick wanted to see this miracle child right away. He was already mapping out a plan to test her, record the results, contact the people in Carolina and elsewhere. But it would not be that easy; there was Wasserman to contend with, for one. And it was important to consider what was best for Sarah.
There was also the question of how far this talent could reach. There was still a big difference between levitating parlor tricks and the ability to bring the very walls down around their heads. A rain of stones. Or something larger. A little girl with a mind like that could be very valuable to the wrong people.
Jess sat clutching a cup of tea at her kitchen table, while Otto rubbed his fluffy tail against her bare legs. Outside the window it was still dark, though it must be approaching dawn; she had not heard the trains running for a while now, and the traffic was almost nonexistent. Soon it would pick up as people resumed their daily lives, rushing into work so they could hurry up and go home again.