Unseen #2: Door to Alternity

by Nancy Holder

  After a time, she found her center, and began to block the sounds out, one by one. They became echoes of themselves, very distant. The chilliness of the room—Mr. Giles liked it cool—dissipated, and Tara was enfolded in warmth. Her body became light; she imagined herself rising above the floor, levitating a few inches—

  —and then, like a shot, she was hovering high above the earth, with Willow and Doña Pilar on either side of her. They were forming a circle in the clouds, walking among them in glowing, disembodied forms. She looked across at Willow, whose face was filled with light; and then the older lady, whom she had not yet met. She had never felt so calm and happy, and strong, and then—

  —She was flying beside a sleek, black crow with a twinkle in its eyes. It was her Willow, and she flapped her wings to keep up with her. They swooped and soared above the streets of Los Angeles, on a bright and brilliant afternoon. Cars and buses clogged the streets; the sidewalks were bursting with busy people, color, and motion. It was a glorious, beautiful day.

  “It wasn’t like this last time,” Willow said; and it was as if, by speaking, she had flown into a different place.

  Darkness fell over them like an icy net; Tara flew through thick, cold blackness, syrupy and foul. She looked over, seeking Willow, and saw nothing.

  She shivered, hard, and tried to speak. But when she opened her mouth, the blackness filled it. She choked, then spat it out, knowing, somehow, that she must not swallow it, must not allow it passage into her being.

  Then someone brushed the little fingers on both her hands; the darkness slid away and she was back in the brilliance, and the love. A sublime contentment filled her and she turned her head, very slowly. All of her moved in slow motion, including her thoughts. She saw eddies and currents of silvery light emanating from her fingertips, and where her heart sat in her chest, golden light flowed outward.

  “This is stronger magick than I have ever experienced,” Doña Pilar told the girls. She, too, was a figure of golden, shimmering light. “Do you realize how close to the center of the light we are standing?”

  Suddenly, alarm pricked along the back of Tara’s neck. She said, “Someone’s coming.”

  The three became alert; Tara heard heartbeats—three, no four of them. She listened intently. Three beat in unison; the other was terribly wrong, terribly off.

  “There is someone outside the house,” Doña Pilar said. To Tara, “Stay in the circle. Flow with us.”

  They moved through variegated mists; past colors and sounds that were blurs. People and objects stretched and lost shape as the trio wafted past, like phantoms.

  A rectangle of brown vacillated before Tara, losing its angles, straightening out, then stretching sideways. It was a door.

  It opened.

  Tara accompanied the other two witches outside. The sky was a living blue; the grass below her feet thrummed with mystical energy.

  Deep, penetrating dread shot through her, making her bones ache with cold. She began to shiver. She held tightly to the hands of the other two witches. The sky tilted sideways, vibrating a strange, flat purple-gray, like a bruise.

  A huge, black shape reared up on hind legs and opened up its maw. Horror and death and evil poured out of it, and Tara began to back away.

  “Nicky!” Doña Pilar shouted.

  “Don’t!” Willow cried.

  But the old lady let go of Tara and Willow, racing toward the shadow. She held out her hands, sobbing, “Mi’jo!”

  The shadow rose up, higher, higher, then rolled over itself, cresting like a wave.

  “No!” Willow cried again, grabbing at the woman.

  The phone was ringing.

  On the floor of Giles’s bedroom, Tara jerked out of her trance and grabbed the phone before anyone downstairs could get it first.

  “Willow?” she said.

  On the other end, Willow was out of breath. “I got her. I dragged her back inside the house.”

  “Was it Nicky?” Tara asked.

  There was a pause. Willow said, “Oh, Tara, I hope not. It was evil.”

  Tara nodded. “We made strong magick with her, Willow. Maybe we can undo the evil. If it’s him.” She was exhausted.

  “Lie down,” Willow said, as if she could feel her tiredness. “Get some rest. We’ll try to figure out what happened.”

  “Please, be careful.” Tara gripped the phone. “If anything happened . . . to you . . .”

  “I won’t let anything happen.” Willow’s voice was soothing. “Rest now, okay?”

  “Okay,” Tara said. But as she hung up the phone, she thought, She can’t promise nothing will happen. No matter how strong our magick, it seems like whatever’s out there is even stronger.

  Downstairs, Spike groused, “That’s all you people do, is use the loo!”

  “Then find somewhere else to hide from the sun.” Anya was indignant.

  The voices drifting through her consciousness reminded Tara that she really should go downstairs, let the others know what had happened.

  But that would require moving. She tried to move her arm . . . or at least, she thought about moving her arm. Just thinking about it was exhausting.

  Frowning softly to herself, Tara drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter 7

  Moscow, 1983

  ALEXIS VISHNIKOFF TRAMPED TOWARD HOME, CLUTCHING his battered umbrella as a futile gesture of defiance against the freezing rain. A wind that seemed to blow straight down from the Barents Sea drove the stinging pellets against him, and his feet threatened to slip out from under him with every step. By now, he’d thought he would have a car of his own, if not a driver. But it was not to be. The American president, Reagan, kept building more and more weapons, increasing the global stakes. The Soviet Union scrambled to keep up. Now Reagan had proposed something called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Americans were calling it Star Wars. It would, Alexis was assured, never work. But there had to be a response nonetheless. And the frustrating thing was that Andropov, in his blindness, didn’t see that the People’s Project could be that response.

  But it was too visionary for him, or at least that’s how Vladimir Markov characterized it. Yuri Andropov was not a man of vision, he was a plodder. Amazing he had risen so high in the party to begin with. He seemed constitutionally unable to understand the promise of the People’s Project, so he ignored it in favor of new and more powerful missile systems. The Soviets and the Americans both had enough warheads to destroy the world a hundred times over, and still Andropov wanted more. Thinking about him, Alexis shook his head. Icy wind whipped his cheek.

  He lived in a flat on the next block over, on Petrovka Street, less than a kilometer from the nondescript office building that housed the People’s Project. Andropov didn’t understand the Project, but that didn’t mean it didn’t proceed. Its funding had been established more than a decade ago, and that didn’t change. The problem was that there were no increases coming, while the cost of everything else went up and up. The simplest office supplies, paper clips or notebooks, had to be purchased on the black market most of the time. If one of the computers went down, someone had to work on it overnight until it functioned again, as there would be no affording a replacement. But still, despite the hardship, the scientists and researchers who had been working on it continued to work on it. Progress was being made.

  If the sidewalks hadn’t been so slick, if the wind had been less fierce, if, if, if . . . if anything had been different, he might never have met her. He would have been walking faster, been covering the ground between the lab and home, lost in thought. But as it happened, he needed to pay attention to where he stepped, to peer out beneath the edge of the umbrella once in a while to make sure it was safe to cross the street, watch for puddles.

  So he saw her, just a glimpse of blond hair piled up on top of her head, of small round glasses perched on a tiny nose, of naturally red lips and a firm jaw almost submerged inside a huge turtleneck—saw a glimpse of her as she closed the door to her own apa
rtment and stepped down to the street, right before his foot really did fly out from underneath him.

  It was, he believed for the rest of his life, seeing her that did it. The brief glance, the moment of noticing her—he turned his head to get a better look, he shifted the umbrella so it wouldn’t block his view, and the whole action threw him just enough off-balance so that when his right foot came down on a patch of ice, he wasn’t ready for it. The foot skidded and he followed it, into the air and then down with a thump on his rear, his legs and hands immediately soaked.

  When he looked up again, embarrassed, she was right there, already kneeling over him with a look on her face that alternated between concern and hilarity. He understood both. He was an important man, a scientist working on a defense project, although she couldn’t have known that. But she would know that he was a bureaucrat, a party member, by the way he dressed and carried himself. She wouldn’t want to be responsible, even inadvertently, for him injuring himself. At the same time, a grown man falling on his bum in the rain was a comical sight, he realized. He looked away from her, a bit shamefaced, but then looked back with a smile.

  “I . . . I slipped,” he said. “But I’m fine, really.”

  “I saw,” she responded. She hadn’t even opened her own umbrella; it lay on the ground beside her, soaking up water. “Are you sure?”

  “Well, I’m wet and cold. But I was wet and cold when I was walking, so the only real difference now is that I’m wet and cold and getting some rest.”

  She laughed, and the sound was like the chime of a distant bell.

  “My flat is right here, Comrade Vishnikoff,” she said. “I could make you some tea, let you dry off for a while before you continue your journey.”

  “No, I’m only—you know me?”

  “Of course,” she said. Now it was her turn to be shy. She looked away from him, as if suddenly aware that she had overstepped some boundary. “I work for the People’s Project,” she said. “You would not know me, of course. My name is Valerya Golodkin. I am new there, I just started a few months ago.”

  “I didn’t even know we were hiring any new researchers,” Alexis said.

  Valerya held out a hand and helped Alexis to his feet. “Please,” she said. “Come inside for a few minutes.”

  Alexis let himself be led into her apartment. Nothing special inside, but she had decorated it nicely with a few pictures she’d cut from magazines and framed, some photographs of Gorky Park and the seacoast, and a couple of pieces of old, well-chosen furniture painted in bright colors. She sat him down at a small kitchen table and put a pot of water on the stove to boil.

  As she did, she explained. “I am not a researcher,” she said. “I am a subject.”

  Alexis was stunned. He thought he had been introduced to all the psychics. Most were frauds anyway, he knew— people pretending they had the ability so they could steal a few rubles from the Treasury. But he had never met Valerya, didn’t remember even having seen her, and he was sure he would remember if he had. Her appearance was striking. Even here in her small flat, he couldn’t stop looking at her.

  “I’m surprised we haven’t met,” he said.

  “I think Comrade Markov has been keeping me a bit of a secret,” she replied. “We’re still doing some testing. He wants to reveal me when he’s sure I am what he thinks I am.” She scooped some loose tea into a well-used infuser and dipped it into a cup. When the kettle began to whistle, she splashed boiling water over the infuser, and brought the cup to the table. “Milk?”

  “No, thank you,” Alexis said. “What do you mean, what he thinks you are?”

  She sat down across from him at the table. “When I touched you, outside. Helping you up. I had a feeling about you. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Two things, really,” she went on. “I’m not sure how they connect, but they do.”

  “Very well. Continue.”

  “At your flat, there is a very large painting on the wall. A musical instrument. A harp, a piano, something with strings. You have never played that instrument, hardly ever look at the painting, but it’s there.”

  “A harpsichord,” Alexis said. “I have a painting of a woman playing a harpsichord.”

  “And the other thing, I think, is part of why there is such sadness in you. A fire, when you were very young.”

  “My mother died in a fire, when I was eleven,” Alexis confirmed.

  She looked at him, really looked, and he found himself continuing the story. He had never told it to anyone before.

  “She had broken her leg and couldn’t move fast enough to get out of the house. I wasn’t home—I came home from school, as the fire was consuming the house. When I saw the smoke I ran, and when I got closer and couldn’t see her outside I knew that she must be inside.”

  He took a breath. He felt her gaze upon him, and felt strengthened, and warmed, despite his wet clothes and his frozen memories. All his life, part of him had been cold; nothing had ever warmed it before.

  Heat had killed his mother; therefore, heat was dangerous.

  “I tried to get in,” he whispered hoarsely, “but the neighbor next door, he was too strong—he held me, restrained me. He kept me from rushing inside. I probably would have died. Instead, she did.”

  “And she played the harpsichord,” Valerya said, her voice gentle.

  “She played piano,” Alexis corrected her. “But I never found a painting I liked of a woman playing a piano.” He looked at her. She held his gaze, her blue eyes steady and clear. A strand of her yellow hair had come loose, and tickled at the corner of her mouth.

  He cleared his throat. “You could have learned all of that from my file at the Project,” he said finally. “If you’re a favorite of Markov, you would have access to it.”

  “I could have,” she agreed. “But I didn’t. And I think you know it.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, knowing the answer before he did.

  She reached out, took his hand again. “Because you can do it, too,” she said. “You can see into me as easily as I see into you. Look.”

  He felt her flesh, warm against his palm. Their hands trembled a little and he didn’t know if it was her or himself. He pushed the question away, trying to blank out his mind, like pulling a clean shade down over a window so the view was obscured.

  When his mind’s eye looked out onto an empty canvas, he closed his actual eyes and let a picture draw itself there. He saw Valerya, but a slightly younger version of her, barely out of her teens, it seemed. She walked along a seaside, possibly in Odessa, Alexis thought, by the Black Sea. A tall young man with thick brown hair and piercing green eyes held her hand. Those eyes were turned toward Valerya, and the love in them was unmistakable as he watched her watching the sea. Alexis knew this young man was named Berdy, that he was, at twenty-two, three years older than Valerya, and—as he felt Berdy’s hand, through Valerya’s perceptions—that he was about to ask her to marry him.

  But he also knew that within a year of this moment, Berdy would be dead, shot in the throat and face in a dusty Afghan hamlet. The picture he was watching changed, like a dissolve in a movie, and then he saw Valerya again, sitting in a room not unlike this one, reading the letter from the Soviet military that informed her in dispassionate language that her fiancé had died on the Afghan front. Tears streamed down her face, blurring the paper that she gripped in an unshaking hand.

  Alexis let go of her hand, breaking the connection as decisively as hanging up a telephone or pulling a plug. He knew now that she was, in fact, younger than she appeared—that the tragedy of her brief marriage to a doomed man had changed her, aged her in some way. She still looked young, but there were worry lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth that seemed to make her look like someone who had been around for a while. A sense of maturity had settled about her like a bank of fog on the Volga. Valerya, he believed, had turned inward after Berdy’s death, seeking some kind of meaning wit
hin herself, and, remarkably, finding it there.

  He believed he came to love her at that moment.

  After that day, they were inseparable. Valerya took him by the hand into Comrade Markov’s office the following day, and declared in no uncertain terms that Alexis was not to be considered a scientist anymore, but a subject, one who would work with her to heighten perception and increase abilities.

  Markov remained unimpressed—until Valerya and Alexis submitted to a test he had devised. They took a standard test—determining cards held in Markov’s hand, describing pictures as they were drawn from a stack in another room, selecting numbers that would come up on random rolls of dice. No one had ever scored more than sixty percent on these combined tasks, until Valerya and Alexis tried them together. They shattered every record. They scored in the nineties on every demonstration. Markov’s jaw fell in amazement.

  From that point on, Markov agreed with Valerya. He relieved Alexis of his laboratory duties, to work exclusively with Valerya, under the watchful eye of Markov himself. The world’s most comprehensive and aggressive government investigation into the military applications of psychic abilities had just received an enormous boost in potential, and Markov—with the help of Alexis and Valerya Vishnikoff, as she became when they were married on the three-month anniversary of their meeting— planned to ride that potential to the party’s apex.

  Los Angeles

  Kate Lockley parked her car in the employee lot at Benjamin Harrison High in Los Angeles, leaving a POLICE placard in the window so it wouldn’t be ticketed or towed while she was inside. She glanced up and down the rows of cars—Toyotas, Nissans, Ford Focuses, mostly economy cars that cost less and didn’t demand much fuel. Then she looked over at the student lot as she strode up toward the front door. SUVs, raised trucks on huge tires, sports cars, convertibles. The Mercedes, Porsche and BMW brands outnumbered VW Beetles in that lot.