“I don’t believe that’s why she’s here,” Ben said. “I think she’s being careful. She could be afraid.”
“Yeah, of being found out,” Anita said.
Now Ben was getting frustrated. “I’ll say it again, Anita: there are phenomena at work. Genuine get-thee-from-me-Satan stuff. You heard Caitlin last night. You heard her here, in this apartment, when she was physically downtown. Christ, she gave you a message for me!”
“It was a phone, a device, an open line, something,” she said.
“Do you really believe that?”
“I do. I have to.”
“You saw the snake—”
“I saw a smoky shape,” Anita said. “Now that I think of it, maybe there was something in that cigar—”
“Which Madame Langlois didn’t light.”
“Not all psychoactive drugs are delivered by heating,” Anita replied. “The bark of Virola trees are used to create powdered hallucinogenic snuff—she puffed it our way then led us with her fingers, the simplest kind of hypnosis. You said it yourself: Count Dracula stuff.”
Ben shook his head. “You’re not hearing me. I’ve been with Caitlin when things have happened. Weird things.”
“The only weird thing is that I’m not tearing loose on these two and demanding answers,” Anita said. “And I’m not the only one.”
Ben gave her a quizzical look.
“Arfa doesn’t like them either,” Anita said.
“Right, where is the cat?”
“Exactly,” Anita said. “He doesn’t like other animals in the apartment. If there was a real snake out there, he would’ve been hissing and spitting.”
“My point exactly,” Ben said. “It was not a ‘real’ snake.”
Ben turned away from her. He was typically rational, yet here he was trying to argue against a traditional explanation. He shook his head.
“I have to go to work,” he said. He glanced at the clock on the night table. Caitlin had had it for decades, since they were students at NYU. It was not digitaclass="underline" the numbers flipped over on little plastic cards inside the white case. He missed his friend… he missed those days. There were times, like now, when he ached with that longing. “It’s six forty-five,” he said. “Caitlin’s parents will be here in an hour or so and I have an idea. I think. I will bring Madame Langlois and Enok to my place.”
“You’d trust them?”
“With what—my fridge and flat-screen? We can’t leave them with the O’Haras, so it’s either that or we turn them out.”
“I still vote for the latter,” Anita said hotly. “People who want to help… help. That’s what Caitlin did.”
She saw Ben’s sad eyes, quickly realized her mistake, and corrected herself. “That’s what Caitlin does. They don’t play games like our Vodou lady, they don’t talk without listening.” She continued in a softer voice. “Caitlin is a humanitarian. She doesn’t deserve what happened.”
“That’s a separate topic and there, at least, we agree,” Ben said. “But that doesn’t solve the immediate problem.”
Anita’s comments had sounded too much like a eulogy and Ben had to get away, not just emotionally and mentally but physically. He went back into the hallway to prepare to get the Langloises over to his East Side apartment near the United Nations. He looked in at Jacob again, resisted gathering up the boy’s drawings. Jacob and his mother shared a strong bond and there might be subtle, subliminal clues as to what happened. But the boy might wake and look for the sketches: in a world made suddenly very unstable, Ben wanted him to have at least that anchor. He left and headed back down the hall. Arriving in the living room, he swore through his teeth.
“What is it?” Anita asked, hurrying in.
“You got your wish,” he said, turning to the front door, pulling it open, and looking out into the empty hallway. “Madame Langlois and her son have left.”
CHAPTER 5
Vilu lay sprawled on the hard-packed sand of the courtyard. He was lying on his back, his eyes shut, his mouth open.
Caitlin ran to him. Surrounded by slowly encroaching Galderkhaani, she forgot her own plight when she bent over him. For an instant, like the scrape of a knife along her breastbone, she felt that it was Jacob falling, needing her help, needing her comfort.
Lasha had followed with a bowlegged gait and a loud huffing. The other citizens were clustering tighter, trying to see what the woman was doing as she knelt over the prone boy.
“Is there a physician?” she asked Lasha.
The man looked back at the gathered faces. “Weta? Does anyone see Weta?”
“She is in the birth center!” someone shouted back.
“Run! Get her!” Lasha said then turned to Caitlin. “That building is at the far end of the village, away from the sea chill, and Weta is aged. It will take time.”
Time. It kept coming up, seemed to be Caitlin’s enemy in every possible way. She focused on the boy. She didn’t bother to explain that she was a doctor herself: what she wanted immediately for the boy was a bed, shelter, and someone to watch him after she did triage. Most likely they had herbs or compounds, though she didn’t know that any of them would work. Ancient medicines and cures were hit-and-miss. When they missed, they often made the patient worse.
She also prayed, audibly, under her breath, that her worst fears weren’t realized—that this was not a transference of souls.
Her first thought was that Vilu had suffered heatstroke or dehydration, and she told Lasha to bring water. Unbending with a grunt, the old man turned and scurried back to his hut for a ladle.
Motioning for people to step back and give Vilu air, Caitlin saw that he was perspiring and, feeling for his heartbeat, found it normal. So was his temperature—assuming that the Galderkhaani “normal” was the same as that of modern humans. It wasn’t heatstroke, but that forced open the door to those other, deeper concerns. Jacob had been reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. She prayed that that had nothing to do with what this boy had uttered, but in her heart she didn’t believe it.
He followed me here, she thought ominously. There can be no other explanation.
Lasha arrived with an alok, a wooden, short-handled ladle that he’d filled from the pool. Apparently, they knew nothing of bacteria or parasites in Galderkhaan. Nonetheless, she took it and wet the boy’s lips from a bony rim. He responded weakly and she put a hand behind his head to support him as he tried to take more. The feel of his hair seemed so familiar. Caitlin struggled to keep back deep, heaving sobs. But she could not help herself from looking down at the sweet face, the ruddy skin with just a hint of pale white freckles, the dark hair that fell in natural ringlets over a broad, innocent forehead. Caitlin used the sleeve of her loose-fitting tunic to dab away the sweat that was beading under his eyes and on his cheek.
His four-flippered friend waddled through the legs of the crowd.
“Shoo!” Lasha growled, kicking lightly at the thyodularasi.
Without taking her eyes from the boy, Caitlin passed the ladle to Lasha.
“What could have happened?” the old man asked, peering over her back.
“Excitement,” said a teenaged girl who was looking on. “He so loves the airship.”
“Then why did he say—what did he say?” Lasha asked. “Sybamurn?”
Caitlin realized with a jolt that the boy had spoken it in English; Lasha had uttered a Galderkhaani approximation.
“Submarine,” Caitlin clarified without thinking—also in English.