Once she understood that this was the door, her disorientation resolved itself and she stood up, feeling for the doorknob. She found it and turned it, but it was locked tight.
She called, “Hello, I’m awake! Hello!”
Not a sound came in reply.
She tried to look at her watch, but couldn’t find it on her wrist. Taken. Not stolen, of course, she didn’t think that.
They’d overdone this, and she saw a chance to put on a performance.
“Hey! HEY!” She shook the door, then hammered on it.
Nothing.
She felt the walls and found a quiltlike surface on them. She ran her palms along it. Soft. So was the floor, soft, quilted. There was no window. The ceiling no longer had caged lights on it, but rather flush glass fixtures that emitted a faint nocturnal glow.
He’d doped her with something more than Xanax, that clever David, good at every job he’d ever done. And she’d thought she hadn’t swallowed the pill. She hadn’t been meant to—or rather, it hadn’t mattered. Whatever had done this to her had been in the water.
So, okay, here we go. He wanted crazy, he was going to get crazy.
She backed up, then took in a deep breath and screamed her lungs out.
And—wow, that was something! Her heart was hammering, her body flushing with adrenaline. She did it again, then threw herself against the door.
The padding absorbed the blow without the slightest effect, which was genuinely disturbing and isolating, and made it quite easy to scream more, so she screamed and screamed and screamed, and roamed the cell, hurling herself against the walls, against the door, dropping to the floor and rolling and screaming, and screaming and screaming and screaming. But, then again, that’s what a padded cell is for.
She stopped. This was all well and good. She was putting on what must be a convincing performance. But she was also here for serious reasons. She needed to get the arc furnace running. There was a lot of gold to make and only a little from Guatemala to start the process, far less than she had expected to find. And there was the matter of the painting. It would be a meticulous, difficult process, enormously intimidating, and all of it needing to be done on a very tight and very precise schedule.
The whole world had arrived at the border of an unknown country, a rare shadow land that few men ever enter and fewer recall. Already, they were advanced into it, for the death of Aubrey Denman, an incalculable disaster, had not been predicted in any of the writings of Herbert Acton.
This was because he had not foreseen it. Her father had told the class, “There is a period at the end of a cycle of time that we call its omega point, where life itself enters the unknown. An omega point is a dark labyrinth from which only the few will escape.” He had smiled then, this gentle and compassionate man, a smile filled with hope and pain. “Be among the few,” he had said.
She rattled the door again, and this time it was no game. “Let me out,” she shouted. But there was only silence in reply.
This time, when she screamed, it was no act, and she screamed and screamed and screamed.
DAVID FORD’S JOURNAL: THREE
The staff is alerting me about poor Caroline again and again, but I sense that she’s taking advantage of the situation to do a little playacting, and I keep thinking that I need to let her do that. Somebody needs to be convinced, I feel sure. But I don’t want her to pretend so well that I have to put her in a jacket or shock her.
Caroline is brilliant. But how did she get here through all that mayhem on the outside? Was she helped, perhaps, by the resources of the Seven Families?
I wish that I could have proof that she is the real Caroline Light.
I have about convinced myself to take the risk of opening up to her. Despite the fact that I don’t have any recollection of her, I am tremendously drawn to her, and perhaps that is a sort of memory. If we were children when we last met, she would look entirely different, would she not?
After she drank the sedative, I held her in my arms and she felt as light as air, her body slack with sleep, her sangfroid gone. Her vulnerability broke my heart even as it filled it.
Glen turned up nothing unusual in her belongings. Her driver’s license seems genuine, for example, but what does that mean?
If she’s the real person and she isn’t in amnesia, I need her desperately.
Last night, there were monstrous, flaring, leaping auroras. Today, half the face of the sun is covered with gigantic sunspots.
The Internet, TV, and all telephone systems have more or less failed. Even the patient families we have relied on for food deliveries are not supplying us at this time, and we cannot reach them to find out what’s happening.
What happens when we eat our last food and burn our last fuel? And when the solar flares get worse, then what? What I need to know is how we survive.
At least Katie Starnes is becoming more at ease around me. She isn’t a problem like Caroline, and I would really welcome some development in our friendship. Just friends, though, sexual friends like we had in med school. No commitments, and I don’t think she’s looking in that direction, either. I hope not, at any rate, because this is no time to involve oneself in hopes for the future.
What’s my next step? Where do I turn? I don’t have a religion, not even some childhood thing to fall back on. My parents were scientists and atheists, just as I am. But right now, there are only three words that come to mind, that haunt me, that never leave my thoughts for long: God help us.
6
THE SOUND OF BLOOD
Again Mack heard them, pulsating out of the dark, long cries of human anguish. He could open neither his window nor his door, and he wasn’t absolutely sure that they were coming from inside the facility. With all the mayhem these days, they could be from the distant streets.
As scream after scream pealed out—but so faint, why did they use all this soundproofing?—his whole body was set to vibrating.
He pressed his intercom button.
“Yes, Mack?”
“Somebody’s upset.”
“It’s the new intake. She’s struggling again. We’re calling one of the residents for her.”
He threw himself on his bed. Damn, what did this mean? He would have sworn she was an actress, no more crazy than he was. But this was one hell of an act, damn her eyes.
He did not want to sweat over some worthless loony, he wanted to sleep. But there would be no sleep, they doled out their goddamn pills nowadays like they were gold fucking bars. Worse. Everybody around here was crawling in gold bars, but they damn well were begging for Lunesta. Damn fucking cheap bureaucrats.
“What’s her name?”
“You can ask her when she’s in the population.”
“Sweet Caroline, I already got that much. Also, the fact that she’s a bitch. That came through loud and clear.” After tonight’s transmission, General Wylie had come back inside of a minute. “Get me the name.”
At this point in time, any new arrival was important.
“She might be a bitch, but she’s suffering now, Mack.”
“Caroline . . . who?”
“Ask her!”
Well, the hell with it, the screaming had stopped, and thank you, God. He turned out his light—and, damn, the flickering out there was incredible. He went to his wire-enforced window. The sky was a flaring, jumping curtain of multicolored light.
He was not making the kind of progress that was needed. They should have put a whole team in here. He hated to admit it, but that was the truth of it. Too late now.
In Mexico City, in the embassy’s garden, he had watched the gods dancing in the night sky, watched Tezcatlipoca shift from man to jaguar to serpent, taunting and raging at his brother Quetzalcoatl. In Egypt, Quetzalcoatl was Osiris, the god of resurrection, and Tezcatlipoca was his brother Set, who cut him into small pieces. The Bible called them Cain and Abel. In Judea, the light and dark brothers had been Jesus and Judas.
He identified with Tezcatlipoca, El Gato,
the night cat roaming and changing, the shadow cat. That’s where his nickname came from. Doing his work, he moved like a cat.
But just as he had planned to begin exploring patient and personnel files, he had suddenly been deprived of his ability to leave his room at night.
They’d found out that he’d been off the premises the night Dr. Ullman was killed. Well, yes.
Now this new director and patient turn up just when it was expected that the Acton group would be putting their leadership in place—and here he was, locked up like a monkey in a GODDAMN ZOO!
He twisted on the bed, as uncomfortable as a man in a rack. And that thought took his mind back down a path it loved to go and hated to go, the torture path.
You look down at the guy in straps and you know that he belongs to you. You lay the cloth over his face, adjusting it a little, drawing out the suspense. He turns his head and Billie Fisk gets it between her sweet knees and holds it steady for you. Then you get the pitcher, you fill it in the sink, you hear the echoing drip of the water on the tiles as you carry it brimming over to the guy’s gurney-bound body. It’s not a torture chamber or something, it’s a men’s room with a DO NOT DISTURB sign from some hotel on the door. Embassy basement, where else were they gonna go? Their work was illegal on Mexican soil.
Then you ask your question and you do not wait for the bullshit answer, you start your pour. The body of Ramos curves on the board. Stomach sucks in. Legs pulse. Dick comes up. Feet hammer. Pour and pour. Neck goes from red to purple.
You run out of water. As you are refilling, you ask your question again. This time, he kind of starts in, but you don’t listen. You and Billie will work him for an hour, doing maybe twenty pours. When his dick comes up this time, you dig your heel into it. You slip and practically fall on your ass. Billie laughs.
Somebody somewhere reviews the video feed, looking for clues in the body language, piecing together bits of words, all of that, working up a report for whoever.
Drug interdiction, that was the mission.
Thing is, why? Why are drugs even illegal? They’re good, they do a search-and-destroy operation on the weak.
Never mind, you did your work and now you are here playing crazy, and, you gotta admit, it’s just a little too easy to act that way.
She started screaming again, and that was it, she reminded him of too damn much. “Fuck this, will you shut her up! Shut her UP!”
“Dr. Claire is with her.”
Claire Michaels, that floppy little puppy of a shrink. “She’s useless! Get Hunt, get Ford! But shut her up, please.”
Was this woman actually one of their leaders, or had her appearance at this time been chance?
Hell, that screaming was loud—and maybe it was there to cover some other sound that he might hear, like the hiss of the arc furnace they had in the art room. It was disguised as a pottery kiln but there were elements in there that could generate truly extraordinary temperatures.
But for what purpose?
It had to be involved with time, and the CIA’s Acton Working Group had determined that Herbert Acton, like certain ancient Egyptians and ancient Maya, had definitely been able to somehow see forward in time. This explained his flawless investments, which statistics could not. As one of the statisticians who had examined them put it, “there isn’t enough chance in all the universe to account for this. He wasn’t lucky, he was informed.”
In other words, he’d been able to see forward in time. This also explained things like the accuracy of the Mayan calendar. It hadn’t been constructed forward to December 21, 2012, it had been written backward from that date because they had seen forward first, then built their exquisite calendar from the top down, as it were.
Seeing didn’t make a difference now, though. The only thing that would matter to anybody right now was physical movement through time.
So that’s what this place had to be about.
If this Caroline was indeed one of their leaders, she had some damned important secrets, there was no question about that.
His mission was quite clear, and he didn’t need General Wylie screaming down the horn at him to tell him that he needed to confirm her identity and then obtain her secrets by whatever means presented itself. No legalities, that was over and done with.
He had his problem, though, which was his night confinement and his daytime minder.
For the thousandth time, he considered his window. The upper sash, he could get that down a bit, maybe even work his way out. Problem was, there was nowhere to go from the sill. No, the ductwork was his only option. But he needed a blueprint. You couldn’t go wandering off through the air-conditioning system of a building this size. You’d be heard. You’d get trapped.
There was a faint beep from his desk. Damn, he was shut down for the night, and here was Wylie back again.
He went for his radio, but he never got to it, because the next moment something completely extraordinary happened. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been expecting it. He had. Expecting any damn thing.
What this consisted of was, in quick succession, three flashes that must have been a million times brighter than the sun, flashes that filled not only the eyes but the entire head, as if they had entered every orifice and pore on his body, and penetrated right down to the marrow.
One second, he was going for the radio, and the next the flashes hit. They caused an immediate, powerful, and startling hallucination, a form in plumage, grimacing, its face draped in golden chain mail, skulls strung around its neck, its long, black nails slicing toward him, sparking in the air.
In his surprise, he cried out, he pressed himself against the wall beside the bed.
That had been a damned hallucination of his own adopted god, Tezcatlipoca. But as his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light, he realized that it was still here, it was real, he could even hear the clatter of its bejeweled robe and the swish of its plumed headdress as it darted its face toward him with the horrible precision of a snapping vulture.
In another instant, though, his revulsion passed. It was as if a fire came into his body, lighting up the cells, causing his spirit to dance within him, and it was a dark and bloody dance.
With understanding, the apparition faded. He had seen a reflection of his own soul in a very special light, and boy, had he felt it. The energy of the damn god of death had come into him. That had been powerful.
His radio beeped again. Goddamn them! He turned off his light and opened the drawer. His little Sony was a masterpiece of clandestine technology, its additional circuits smaller than grains of rice. On the surface, it was an ordinary multiband portable. But it also contained this other component, a high-energy single-sideband transceiver and very careful shielding so that it would not be fried by solar electromagnetic energy.
The small display quickly flashed the decoded message. “General warning. General warning to all stations. Atomic clocks have stopped worldwide. Repeat. Atomic clocks have stopped.”
Physicists had theorized that such a thing might happen, as the world came to the end of the cycle.
They had gone past the frontier of reality. And at that very moment, the people who ran this place had started something new, some device that emitted light that drove you to face the truth of your soul.
And here was Mack the Cat, trapped in his damn room.
The end of time had arrived and what did he have to do? He had to goddamn well wait!
DAVID FORD’S JOURNAL: FOUR
It’s now three o’clock in the morning and I have been paging through every book in this library and I have been doing it for five hours, and I will now record the reason. My search was inspired by those last two sentences at the end of the list. The first one was, “What I could not do, you must.”
I interpret this to mean that he could not accomplish time travel, but knew that it was possible, and also that it would be, in our era, the only route of survival. But movement through time—literal, physical movement into another time—how could that
ever be done?
When I was in college, the great physicist Stephen Hawking announced that he had changed his view of time travel, saying that he had come to believe that it was indeed possible. Last year—God, how long ago that seems—there was an experiment at the CERN supercollider in Switzerland that projected subatomic particles into the future, which were detected a few millionths of a second later, as they “landed” in time and the rest of the world caught up with them. They had never left time, but rather had moved through it faster than the universe normally allows.
Still, though, can something as large as a human body ever be accelerated like that? Even if this were possible, we’d have to go incredibly far in order to find a world that had healed from the wounds of this catastrophe.
Herbert Acton didn’t do it. From my days in the class, I remember visiting his grave, which is on this estate. Mrs. Acton took us there, and now lies beside him, I am sure. They had no children. Understandable, knowing the future as they did.
As impossible as acceleration through time sounds, it may be that it has happened before—not to a human being, but to an animal.
A story that might involve time movement appears in a book called, I believe, Hunt for the Skinwalker, by a biochemist called Colm Kelleher. Dr. Kelleher was the manager of the Institute for Discovery Sciences, an organization which sought to bring scientific method to the study of unusual events.
One of these events was the sudden appearance of an enormous wolf on a property that had been bought for the institute. This property, in Utah, was known to be a hotbed of odd events and sightings of the otherworldly.
When I read the book, I recognized the animal to be a dire wolf. It came up to a paddock containing some goats, in full view of the ranchers, then loped away after they shot at it. It went into some tall grass and simply disappeared.
Now, the dire wolf was rendered extinct by the catastrophe that ended the last Ice Age. And yet, here it was on this ranch. The scientists were even able to determine its weight by measuring the depths of its footprints in the marsh where it disappeared.
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