“I’m trying to understand, Jessica. And I’m trying to suggest that you be more patient with yourself and other people.”
“It’s difficult, Dr. Julian, because — well, if they’d listen to me, there wouldn’t be such troubles.”
QUESTION: Might the subject’s rebellious mood in this interview be ascribed to the fact that we were On the beach near where the dog Holly had drowned?
In reference to the above query, several thoughts occur to me, all of them disquieting. At times a darkness settles over Jessica. I don’t quite understand it. It is dissimilar — more pronounced, more foreboding — to attitudes I have encountered in other psychic-clairvoyants studied.
I related it at first to the tragic death of Holly and the overt demonstration of Jessica’s powers to Andrew Dalworth this occasioned. Perhaps this display of her psychic capacity has become fixed for her in an unsettling way with her feelings as an adopted child.
If this is true, if the death of Holly is a simple, triggering incident, it is hardly a serious matter. But I must try to ascertain if something else, something presently unknowable, may be causing these deep moments of anger and resentment, emotions which could be dangerous not only to Jessica but to others.
I think I must review her case histories with particular attention to testing and scoring on the one hand and related ephemora on the other. I must ask Dalworth to bring Jessica down to Dublin as soon as possible.
Chapter Ten
Two days later, Dr. Homewood parked his two-seater sports car in the area reserved for staff near the quad at Trinity College. It was a brisk, spring morning. Sunlight brightened the immense cobblestone quadrangle surrounded by gray buildings and crowded now with students in duffle coats and boots hurrying toward classes, bookbags looped over their shoulders.
Mingling easily with these undergraduates in his jeans and loose tweed jacket, Dr. Julian went to his office on the fourth floor of the science building. He dropped his briefcase on a chair stacked with books and pulled up the window shades which gave him a view of college halls and the bulk of a steepled church, its dark stone walls scored with scaffoldings.
Then he opened Jessica’s files. He started in chronological order with their first meeting on the tenth of April, several years ago. Her blood pressure had been normal, her height forty-two inches, her weight fifty-one pounds. She had started a poem for him that first day, handing it to him without embarrassment after Andrew Dalworth had left them alone in the doctor’s office.
“I can’t finish it till I know you better,” she had said, seated in the chair opposite him, her shoes swinging free above the floor.
There was a copy of the poem in her files.
Dr. Julian sorted through the results of examinations he had given Jessica over the years, noting again her records and reactions to the Berenreuther Personality Inventory, Rorschach and Thematic Aperception Tests, the Stanford-Binet and the Pinter-Patterson Performance Scales.
During this period, Jessica had participated in most of the laboratory and field tests available to modern psychic researchers. Identification of numbers written on concealed blackboards, blindfolded guessing of playing cards, identification of persons and objects in sealed rooms, with therapeutic breaks to eliminate the decline effect (or plain boredom) associated with repetitious lab experiments.
Other tests included a reading of Jessica’s attempts to physically affect a supersensitive magnetic compass needle, which registered to one-millionth of the earth’s field. Jessica’s performance had been inconclusive; the change in the output recording was insignificant, the frequency of the oscillation increasing only 1.2 percent for perhaps fifteen seconds.
Dr. Julian studied the results of a test which had particularly interested him at the time, a Global Targeting Examination on a run of ten. Jessica had scored six H’s (Hits), three N’s(Neutrals) and one M (Miss), identifying salient characteristics of areas known only to her through their grid coordinates, latitude and longitude, in degrees, minutes and seconds. Her degree of success had been gratifying. She had, in fact, looked at numbers written on a notepad in an office in Trinity College, Dublin, and had related them — six times out of ten — to the geographical areas they represented, places in the world she had never been — the Ripon Falls, Africa, Lopez Bay, the Philippines, an island in the Celebes Sea near Borneo, stretches of ocean off the Cornish coast. Her one Miss and three Neutrals (too ambiguous to fit into an equation) scarcely detracted from her performance, particularly since it had been conducted under strict laboratory control of defense against unconscious iedetic assistance (after all, Jessica might have at some time seen and memorized maps of those areas). Also, Dr. Julian understood that the object under scrutiny (Jessica) could be affected by the analysis of the witness (himself) — in some cases by his mere physical presence.
At first, Dalworth, the executive accustomed to computerized, corporate decisions at the highest level, had demanded answers, decisions, results — God, how he had demanded them, Dr. Julian thought.
“I want to know why, Dr. Homewood, why Jessica sees these things we don’t, sees things beyond our senses and perceptions. My experience tells me there are always explanations if you dig deep enough and hard enough.”
They had been sitting in a pub on the Liffey at the time and Julian remembered his exasperation with the older man. “Then dig deep and hard into this, Mr. Dalworth,” he had said, giving him a poem that Jessica had presented to him that same day, four stanzas of free verse which she called Pussywillows.
Dalworth read the poem twice, massaging the bridge of his broken nose with a thumb and forefinger.
“Well, you’re the expert, Homewood. What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Julian said and sipped his ale. “I mean that in the most literal sense we can conceive. I simply do not know. There is a breadth and depth to Jessica’s perceptions and precognitions — call them what you will — that brush against the parameters we’ve established so far. Her intimacy with the strange side of nature, the warnings she sees from colors, the oblique alarms running through her poetry — much of that is beyond my experience with run-of-the-mill psychics and clairvoyants, Andrew. And beyond that of my colleagues for that matter.”
Dalworth had looked at him thoughtfully. “All right, I can accept that. Jessica is different. She’s unpredictable. Is there a danger in that for her? Or — for others?”