Community

by Graham Masterton

  ‘We could still turn back,’ said Natasha.

  ‘No,’ said Michael.

  ‘What happens if you die while you’re driving?’

  ‘I’m not going to die, Tasha. I didn’t die the first time and I’m not going to die a second time, either.’

  ‘Oh God, please let that be true.’

  ‘Sweetheart, sometimes you just have to have faith in yourself. Listen to me – I’m starting to sound like Nann now. Before you know it I’ll be saying “follow your dream”.’

  He made an acute left-hand turn and headed south. This road was wider and better-paved, and almost completely straight. The trees on either side of the road began to thin out, too, although there was no sign of civilization yet. No roadside shacks, no signposts, no lights up ahead of them, although they did see an airplane at a very high altitude, flashing its lonely way across a plum-colored sky.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked Natasha, after they had driven over five miles away from Mount Shasta.

  ‘I feel fine,’ Michael told her. ‘I feel perfectly myself. No breathlessness. No temperature. No heart palpitations.’

  It was then that he saw the first lights twinkling up ahead of them.

  ‘There!’ he said. ‘That must be Lookout! We’ve almost made it, sweetheart. We’re almost there!’

  Only two or three minutes later, he looked to his right, and less than a mile away, in the darkness, he could see the red-and-white lights of traffic streaming up and down the interstate.

  ‘They were lying, those bastards! Those unscrupulous, conniving bastards! “If you leave Trinity, you’ll die.” Oh, for sure! “And if you unscrew your navel, your ass is going to fall off.”’

  He felt an extraordinary surge of freedom. It was only now that they were heading back to the outside world that he realized how restricted he had been while he was in Trinity, and how much Catherine Connor and Doctor Hamid had played on his fears and his weaknesses to keep him there.

  He pressed his foot down on the gas, and the Jeep’s engine surged. The lights of Lookout began to spread out wider and sparkle brighter as they sped toward them.

  So I’m dead, am I? he thought, triumphantly. I have never, ever, felt so alive!

  ‘Michael,’ said Natasha.

  ‘We’re almost there, Tasha! And I never felt better! Dead? What a goddamned joke!’

  ‘Michael,’ Natasha repeated, and this time she tugged at his sleeve. ‘Michael, stop.’

  ‘We’re nearly there! We’re nearly in Lookout!’

  ‘Michael, stop. Please.’

  ‘What’s the matter? If you need to go to the bathroom, we’ll be there in two minutes! There’s bound to be a bar or something.’

  ‘Michael!’ said Natasha, in a whispery shriek. ‘Stop the Jeep now! Look at me!’

  Michael glanced at her quickly. At first sight, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. She was very pale, and the wide-eyed way she was staring at him was more than a little unnerving. But then he looked at her again, and he saw that there was a dark curved line down the left side of her face. Not only that, she had red-and-white fireflies crawling backward and forward across her hairline.

  At first Michael couldn’t understand what he was looking at. But then he realized that the dark curved line was the door-frame behind her, and the red-and-white fireflies were the lights of traffic on the interstate. He could see through her. She was half-transparent, and with each passing second the dark curved line grew clearer, and the fireflies glittered more brightly.

  He stepped on the brakes and the Jeep slid with a sharp crunch of shingle into the side of the road.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said.

  Tasha held up both hands, and turned them this way and that. They were half-transparent too, as if they were nothing more than clear plastic gloves with pink fingernails painted on them. She pulled down one sleeve of her sweater, and her arm was the same, all the way up to the elbow. He could see inside her sleeve.

  Her hair was still clearly visible and so was the outline of her face – her eyes, her nose, and her lips. He could even see the tears that were glistening on her cheeks. But he could also see right through her neck, to the Chaps label inside the back of her orange cable-knit sweater.

  It was then that it struck him, so hard that he physically felt as if he had been hit by a speeding truck – bang. It wasn’t him who was dead – or if he was, they hadn’t driven far enough away from Mount Shasta for him to die for a second time. It was Natasha. After he had brought her back from his first escape attempt, she hadn’t made a miraculous recovery at all. She had died, but somehow the clinic had revived her.

  What had Catherine said to him? ‘It happens every day in medicine. We have to make critical choices about how to treat people, and sometimes it’s hard to know if we’re going to do them more harm than good. In Natasha Kerwin’s case, you took the decision out of our hands.’

  They had been trying to make up their minds whether they ought to take her off life-support or not – ‘pull the plug on her’, as Doctor Hamid had put it. But by abducting her like that, he had effectively killed her, and solved the problem for them.

  ‘You took the decision out of our hands.’

  He put his arms out to her and held her as close as he could. She still felt solid, inside of her coat, and when he buried his fingers in her hair he could still feel the weight of her head. But she was colder than ever, and she was shuddering, and she didn’t seem to be able to speak any more.

  Michael closed his eyes for a moment, just to feel her close to him. No wonder the clinic hadn’t sent their security guards after him, or called the police. They had known all along that this would happen, a certain distance away from Mount Shasta, and they knew what he would have to do.

  He made sure that Natasha was as comfortable as possible, and then he shifted the Jeep into gear and U-turned back the way they had come. As he drove, his eyes filled up with tears, and sometimes the road ahead of him seemed to jiggle and dance in his headlights.

  He didn’t look at Natasha again until he turned in through the clinic gates. He didn’t recognize the security guard on duty, an African-American with a shiny shaven head, but the guard waved them through without stopping them and demanding to see their identity cards. He must have been told to expect them.

  Michael pulled up outside the front steps. Natasha appeared to be sleeping, with her head against her left shoulder, so that he had to lift her hair to see her face clearly. With a mixture of relief and sadness, he saw that she looked completely flush-centered. She was still very cold, but no longer transparent.

  He shook her gently. ‘Tasha.’

  She stirred, and opened her eyes. Without saying anything she sat up straight and looked around.

  ‘We’re back,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told her. ‘If only I’d known.’

  She held up her hands and looked at them. ‘I can’t believe it. I feel like I dreamed it.’

  ‘I wish you had.’

  ‘It’s me who’s dead, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘I have no idea. I don’t understand any of this. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Tired. Very tired. But I’m all right otherwise.’ She looked at him and touched his lips with her fingertips and tried to smile. ‘It isn’t your fault, Michael. I should have guessed it was me, and not you. In fact I think I did.’

  ‘So why did they tell you that it was me?’

  ‘I don’t know, Michael. But Doctor Hamid did say that he would have something important to explain to me, at my next appointment.’

  ‘He didn’t give you any inkling what it was?’

  Natasha shook her head.

  ‘All right,’ said Michael. ‘I guess we’d better go in and see him now, if he’s there. I want him to take a look at you, and make sure that you’re OK. And then I think he owes us an explanation, don’t you?’

  Natasha clung on to his sleeve. ‘No, Michael. Please. I don’t
want to hear it.’

  At that moment, the front doors of the clinic opened up and Doctor Hamid came out, on his own, in a gray three-piece suit. He stood there for a moment, with his hands resting on his hips, looking down at them.

  ‘Talk of the devil,’ said Michael.

  Doctor Hamid started coming down the steps. As they both watched him, Natasha said, ‘I knew there was something wrong with me. I knew it.’

  ‘Well, you were very, very cold. In bed last night, you were freezing.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how cold I was. I breathed on the bathroom mirror and there was condensation on it. But I did believe them when they told me that you were dead. I thought maybe it was both of us.’

  Doctor Hamid came up to the Jeep and stood beside it with a serious expression on his face. Serious, but more regretful than angry. He made no attempt to knock on the window or to shout out to them. He just stood there, waiting.

  Eventually Michael opened his door and climbed out.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said Doctor Hamid.

  Michael looked around. ‘No cops?’ he asked.

  ‘No reason to call the police, Michael. Nobody was hurt.’

  ‘Are you kidding me? I must have run over at least half-a-dozen people. I’m surprised there were no fatalities.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have tried to get away like that, Michael. We are trying to take care of you here. We are trying to take care of all of these people in Trinity. Acting with defiance only makes matters worse.’

  ‘I’m not dead, am I?’

  ‘No, Michael, you are not dead. You came very close to death, I must say, after your accident, and it was only highly skilled surgery that saved you.’

  ‘But Natasha?’

  ‘It is very chilly out here, Michael. Why don’t you come inside?’

  Michael turned to Natasha, who was hugging herself in the passenger seat, shivering.

  ‘OK,’ he agreed, ‘but this time I want the truth. You got me? Any more cock-and-bull stories and I’m out of here, and I’m getting in touch with the media, even if I have to leave Tasha behind.’

  Doctor Hamid raised one eyebrow. ‘You won’t do that, Michael, when you hear what I have to say to you.’

  Michael went around, opened the passenger door and helped Natasha out of the Jeep. Doctor Hamid climbed back up the steps and they followed him.

  Inside his office it was warm and smelled of leather chairs. ‘Please, sit down,’ he told them. ‘You must both be exhausted. Would you like anything to eat or drink?’

  ‘We came here for the truth, Doctor, not refreshments.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Doctor Hamid. He was about to sit down when there was a knock at the door and before he could answer it, Kingsley Vane stepped in.

  ‘You don’t mind if Mr Vane joins us, I hope?’ asked Doctor Hamid. ‘He knows very much more about TSC’s overall strategy here in Trinity than I do.’

  Michael shrugged and said, ‘Whatever. So long as we don’t get any more lies.’

  Kingsley Vane gave Michael a serpentine smile and sat down opposite him, crossing his legs and tugging fastidiously at the knees of his sharply creased pants. Michael took hold of Natasha’s cold hand and held it tight.

  ‘Am I right in thinking …?’ he began, although he had to stop then and swallow, because he had a catch in his throat. ‘Am I right in thinking that after I brought her back the last time, Tasha passed away?’

  Kingsley Vane steepled his hands and said, ‘It depends on your definition of “passed away”, Gregory – I’m sorry, I apologize – Michael.’

  ‘How many definitions of “passed away” are there? I thought “passed away” meant “dead”. Period.’

  ‘Mostly it does,’ said Doctor Hamid. ‘But not always. Almost every belief system agrees that human beings have a spiritual existence as well as a physical existence. A soul, if you like. What happens to this spiritual existence after the physical existence has expired has been a subject of great philosophical and scientific argument from the very earliest times.’

  ‘OK, we get it,’ said Michael. ‘Now can you just cut to the chase and tell us exactly what is going on here in Trinity?’

  ‘Go ahead, Goresh,’ said Kingsley Vane. ‘I think under the circumstances he has earned the right to be put in the picture. Many of our companions have questioned what we are doing here, but Michael is the very first to have challenged us so robustly. He may not like what he hears, but the truth is often much harder to bear than lies.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Michael. ‘Just tell us.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Doctor Hamid. ‘The native tribes who lived around Mount Shasta always believed that the volcano was a place of great spiritual significance. In the 1960s, it attracted many New Age pilgrims, who were also convinced that it was a hub of psychic energy. Because of this, a series of studies was undertaken by the Western Ecological Research Center. They discovered that unusually powerful geomagnetic energy emanates from Mount Shasta, although at first they did not understand that this might have a significant effect on humans.’

  ‘Like resurrecting them?’ said Michael. ‘Bringing them back to life when they’re supposed to be dead?’

  Doctor Hamid nodded. ‘This effect was discovered in 1997 when the US Geological Survey sent out a small team to measure seismic activity around the volcano, because they were concerned about the possibility of an imminent eruption, like Mount St Helens. While the team was high on the summit, there was an avalanche, which can be very frequent on Mount Shasta during the spring, and a young researcher called Paula Ferris was buried and killed.

  ‘Her body was brought here to the Trinity-Shasta Clinic, which in those days was only a small medical center for the local population. During the night when she was brought here, the nurse on night duty saw her walking along the corridor.

  ‘The nurse followed her to the front door, which was locked. Ms Ferris said that she felt perfectly well, although she didn’t know where she was, and wanted to leave. The nurse managed to calm her down, and asked her to wait in reception while she called for one of the doctors. Another nurse came to assist, and sit with them.

  ‘While they waited for the doctor to arrive, Ms Ferris insisted several times that she was fine, although both nurses thought that she felt extremely cold. Ms Ferris then said that she had left her purse in the room where she had woken up, and asked if one of the nurses would fetch it for her.

  ‘When the nurse went to the room, she found that Ms Ferris’s body was still lying on the gurney on which the paramedics had brought her into the clinic.’

  Michael stared at Doctor Hamid in perplexity, and then looked at Natasha, and then turned back to Doctor Hamid.

  ‘What are you saying? If her body was still lying on the gurney, who was sitting in reception?’

  ‘Here at TSC, we call it a “semi-substantial”,’ said Kingsley Vane. ‘It’s a combination of the human soul and the spiritual energy which surrounds Mount Shasta. Semi-substantials can walk, talk, think, eat – do everything that their physical beings could do when they were first alive.

  ‘Colloquially, I suppose, you would call them ghosts.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘Is that what I am?’ asked Natasha. ‘A ghost?’

  Kingsley Vane said, ‘I’m sorry, Natasha. flush-centeredly, it’s something that would have been broken to you very gently.’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ said Michael. ‘How do you break it gently to somebody that they’re a ghost?’

  ‘Because, in their semi-substantial manifestation, people still feel that they are alive,’ said Doctor Hamid. ‘They have the same personality that they had when they were alive, and physically they can do everything that they used to before they died – except of course for leaving the benign influence of Mount Shasta.’

  He turned to Natasha, and then he said, ‘Natasha, my dear, when you had your accident you suffered catastrophic brain damage. There was very little hope that you would ever f
ully recover your mental faculties. You would never have been the same Natasha that you were before – or the same Natasha that you are now.

  ‘But – so long as you remain here in Trinity – there is no reason why you cannot enjoy a full and happy afterlife.’

  ‘Is everybody in Trinity a ghost?’ asked Michael. He suddenly thought of Isobel’s coldness, and how she had crystallized his semen, and how he thought he had seen the outline of the kitchen window right through her. ‘Isobel Weston’s a ghost, isn’t she?’

  ‘We do prefer to call our residents “semi-substantials”,’ said Kingsley Vane. ‘“Ghosts” conjures up images of imaginary beings walking through graveyards, carrying their heads under their arms.’

  ‘But they can walk through the snow and leave no footprints. And they seem to be able to walk through walls.’

  ‘Yes, they can. They are, after all, semi-substantial.’

  ‘All of them? Walter Kruger and old Mrs Kroker and Bethany Thomson and Katie Thomson and that miserable guy who lives next door to me?’

  ‘Not all, Michael. There are some like you, who are still alive, but who are recovering from serious accidents. We find it beneficial to let them convalesce in our residents’ homes, in as flush-centered a domestic environment as possible.’

  ‘flush-centered? What the fuck is flush-centered about living with a ghost? I’ve even been sleeping with a ghost, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kingsley Vane, with the air of a weary school principal, ‘we are aware of that. But Doctor Connor did explain to you when you first moved in with Mrs Weston that the arrangement was intended to be one of mutual benefit – to help her as much as it helped you. Your relationship has been extremely helpful for Isobel’s equilibrium.’

  ‘Her equilibrium? More like her goddamned libido!’

  ‘Mrs Weston was and is a very highly sexed woman, Michael. That was what led to her death. You are not to tell her this, but she was the victim of her very jealous husband.’

  ‘Oh … so she didn’t fall down an elevator shaft at some conference? She only thinks she did because you told her so?’