“Relying on just the medical evidence, he’s manifesting a form of hyper-sopor. I would have taken him to the emergency room except that there are no obviously actionable symptoms, he did not have any trauma, and the only food he had was what he hadn’t finished yesterday. His tendon reflexes are normal, there’s no fever, resting heartbeat and respiration are consistent with clinical lethargy, it’s not drug-induced, obviously, and I wanted to talk to you first. Anyway, a relative would have had to sign off on further evaluation.”
“That is absolutely what I would have done,” Caitlin told her. “Has he moved, said anything?”
“Moved—he was half-awake, rapping on the wall, then back asleep. That was about—dawn, I guess. Since then, very little. Opened his mouth slowly as if he was cracking his jaw. Eye movement. Not like REM, only sporadic and definitely deliberate.”
“Like lucid dreaming?”
After considering that for a moment Anita said, “Yes, that’s actually what it’s like. As if he’s awake and consciously, purposefully looking at something. But with his eyes closed.”
“Bless you again for not moving him,” Caitlin said. “It’s a form of trance, like the one I experienced.”
“I figured, but hold on, Caitlin—there’s more,” Anita said. “You had visitors.”
“Who?”
Anita said quietly so Caitlin’s father wouldn’t hear, “From Haiti. A Vodou priestess and her son.”
Caitlin felt a sudden boiling in her gut. “Go on.”
Anita told her about Madame Langlois and the snake, both of which surprised Caitlin but also comforted her in a strange way: the Galderkhaani Priest Yokane was dead and the transcended spirit of the Galderkhaani Azha was gone. Caitlin was glad to have someone around who understood. And there was another snake: a physical manifestation, unlike the others. That was information, even if she did not yet know what to make of it.
“Did Madame Langlois say anything about the serpent?” Caitlin asked.
Nancy frowned, deeply. Caitlin waved her hand as if the question were irrelevant.
“Nothing that made it any less creepy,” Anita said. “A conjurer’s trick, I suppose, though she kept referring to the snake with a plural pronoun—‘they.’”
Then she told her how the Vodou-summoned snake was made up of smaller parts, just like the snake in her own recent vision. That too was fascinating… but elusive.
“I don’t assume they are still there,” Caitlin said. “I can’t see my father allowing that.”
“No,” Anita said. “Ben found somewhere to put the madame and her son, though he didn’t tell me where.”
Caitlin quickly scrolled through her e-mails, saw nothing from Ben. He was probably afraid someone else might look at it. She worked hard to remain calm. She had to fight the pressing urge to be with Jacob, to see the Haitians, to get back to Flora Davies, to find out why all the stones on the planet seemed to have gone quiet, to return to Galderkhaan somehow. Instead, she took an uncharacteristically small, single step:
“Ben is at work?” Caitlin asked.
“Yes. He called here at least a half-dozen times asking if I’d heard from you, making sure Jacob was still the same.”
Just talking about him brought a sudden, welcome equilibrium, as if she’d downloaded all the cautions and safeguards and different points of view that were lodged in his sane British brain. Her mother was a mother, loving and concerned with a strong vein of I know better, but Ben had been a comrade in all this… in so many things going back to their university years.
Caitlin heard dripping then, saw that her pillow was getting soggy and had started to overflow. Caitlin hadn’t expected to be here still, and reluctantly shut the flow. A few moments later a nurse entered.
“I gotta go,” Caitlin said to Anita and ended the call after thanking her again.
The young nurse frowned when he too heard the dripping and looked at the bed.
“Dr. O’Hara—”
“It—came out,” Caitlin told him.
“Did it?”
“Well… clearly.”
“I see.”
“And as you can also see, I’m okay now,” Caitlin went on. “Except that I need a fresh pillow.”
The nurse scowled. He summoned an orderly and a fresh pillow was brought in. Dr. Yang followed briskly with a look that was half-concern, half-disapproval.
The physician made quick work of his patient, finding nothing in her eyes, blood pressure, or chest to alarm him. He agreed not to replace the IV if Caitlin promised to stay in bed. Nancy O’Hara assured him that she would.
“If we weren’t understaffed—” he began.
“I’d help, if you’d let me,” Caitlin said. She was serious.
“Thanks, no. Management prefers when their doctors aren’t also patients.”
“Phuket and the Philippines weren’t so picky,” Caitlin muttered to his back. Sometimes, American health care—and liability—just got to her.
The physician left, along with the nurse, the orderly, and Caitlin’s considerably medicated pillow.
Nancy sat heavily and gratefully in the chair. “This is your life, isn’t it? Urgent, urgent, urgent.”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“I’m too tired to keep up,” Nancy said. “I only slept for three hours last night. I’m going to shut my eyes.” She fixed those eyes on her daughter. “You will stay there?”
“I will,” Caitlin said. She wiggled her smartphone. “Barbara will be here in an hour or so. I’m just going to send e-mails while there’s still life in the battery.”
Her mother nodded agreeably, folded her hands on her waist, and settled back. Caitlin looked at her a moment longer. She understood the woman’s concerns for her daughter because Caitlin shared them for her own child. She could not let on how concerned she was. If Jacob were in Galderkhaan—spiritually, at least—she only hoped Standor Qala had believed what she told her, and that the commander’s physician was a man of curiosity and caution who would do nothing rash or extreme. Caitlin prayed—to a dead man in a dead civilization—to try to understand rather than undo what had occurred. Restoring Vilu by some dramatic, potentially traumatic means could cost Jacob his soul.
Once again, Caitlin had to prioritize as she did in Phuket and other devastated regions around the globe. Jacob had slipped into the past while she was there—possibly drawn by her through some spiritual mechanism she did not understand. There had been a few moments of overlap, of transition. Perhaps it was a variation of what had happened with Maanik, some version of the cazh, their powerful bond pulling his spirit to where she was.
But there was a problem, Caitlin thought. With Maanik, Gaelle, and Atash, the souls from the past tried to drag them into the past. Had Caitlin’s longing to be with Jacob been strong enough to unwittingly create a cazh? Had it failed after a moment or two because it had been subconscious, without the ritual that helped the souls to focus? Had Madame Langlois or her snake done something that prevented them from bonding?
You’re just spitballing, Caitlin told herself. Not that there was anything wrong with that, if she had the time. She did not. Hopefully Barbara could get some answers through hypnosis.
In the meantime, she had to contact Ben and find out what he may have learned from the Haitian mother and son. After the serpentine vision she had experienced in Haiti, and again in her dream, she was particularly interested in the snake Anita had mentioned. That was now too prevalent to be a coincidence.
Jung believed in synchronicity and so do I, she thought.