Shimmer: A Novel

by Passarella, John

  Gideon shot Fallon a surprised one-eyed glance, swallowed nervously—almost embarrassed, she thought—before returning his attention to Thalia.

  Thalia let out a tiny sob and sniffled. “He—he can see.”

  Fallon examined Gideon’s stern face and harsh features and spoke, “Not as well as he could if you helped.”

  Thalia had begun to wring her hands together; desperation seemed to ooze from her pores. She fidgeted in her awkward sitting position and sighed. “Don’t know how.”

  “You need my blood to finish it,” Gideon said. “That’s all. She said as much before we left. Before the bus—”

  Thalia closed her eyes and rocked back and forth. “No blood, please. No blood. I don’t remember how.”

  Fallon maintained contact with Thalia’s flesh, but her hand had slid upward, holding the woman’s forearm in a gentle grip. It felt as if she was tapping into the ebb and flow of Thalia’s emotions, fears and resistance, sort of a psychic thermometer. While she held onto Thalia’s arm, she looked at Gideon again. This time he met her gaze, almost defiantly. “Liana told you she could restore sight to your damaged eye,” Fallon said. It was not a question; he nodded, but offered no further information. Another test, she thought. I’m getting an impromptu Walker initiation. “With a replacement eye.”

  “I have an artificial eye,” Gideon said. “It’s cosmetic only.”

  Fallon nodded. Then it hit her. A lightning bolt of intuition if ever there was one. “Not like that. She made you a beauty.”

  “What is she talking about?” Ambrose asked Gideon, expressing more curiosity than impatience. His bushy white eyebrows drew together as he tried to assemble the pieces. “Liana never mentioned this to me.”

  Gideon grunted and bobbed his head at Fallon. “Ask her.”

  “An enchanted eye,” Fallon said, unable to control her smile. The sensation was such a rush, suddenly discerning something she couldn’t possibly know, at least not rationally. “But it needs your blood to… to what? Activate it?”

  Gideon cleared his throat, noncommittally, but she could tell he was impressed. “Something like that.” He wagged a finger at Thalia. “She knows. They made it together. But it’s not finished. Right now it’s no better than the hunk of plastic I have under this patch.”

  Fallon turned her attention back to Thalia and raised one of the woman’s nervously twisting hands, squeezing it between both of hers. “You can do this, Thalia.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, I can sense it.”

  Continual headshaking accompanied a singsong response: “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

  “I’ll help you,” Fallon said. “If you’ll let me.”

  Thalia seemed lost as she whispered, “Nobody can help me.”

  Without releasing Thalia’s hand, Fallon rose into a crouch and repositioned herself in front of the older woman, who watched her with a measure of curiosity rising beneath her omnipresent fear.

  “Ms. Maguire,” Ambrose began, then modified his tone. “Fallon. We appreciate your concern in this matter, but what is it, precisely, you plan to do here.”

  “Trust me,” Fallon said, smiling as much for Thalia’s benefit as theirs. When you climb on the intuition roller coaster, she thought a little giddily, you don’t examine the blueprints; you simply grab the safety bar and enjoy the ride.

  She took both of Thalia’s hands and stared into the frightened woman’s wild hazel eyes. Some other sense was guiding Fallon, and she had surrendered herself to it. While she took several deep calming breaths, she recalled what Ambrose had predicted about her. “I believe you have the potential… to interact with our kind, to… shift our boundaries.” That’s what Fallon was dealing with at this moment: Thalia’s boundaries. After she’d been traumatized, she’d walled off a part of her psyche, hobbled herself and her abilities. Fallon needed to expand Thalia’s comfort zone without further traumatizing her. That’s what made her task so difficult. If Fallon messed up, she could drive Thalia irrevocably deeper into her defensive shell. Finally, Fallon asked her the most important question. “Do you trust me?”

  Thalia almost snapped out a reflexive response, then pressed her quivering lips together. She closed her eyes and released a tremulous sigh. “I… I… yes, I trust you.”

  “Good,” Fallon said, maintaining a relaxed tone and hoping Thalia would mirror her calm. “Let’s begin.”

  “But… but I don’t know how.”

  “That’s okay,” Fallon assured her. “I do.”

  Thalia nodded, waiting.

  Fallon leaned forward, and without being instructed to do so, Thalia reflected that movement. Their foreheads were inches apart. Fallon could see flecks of gold in the green sea of Thalia’s irises. As she stared into the older woman’s eyes, the pupils expanded. Fallon’s reflection slipped away from the slick surface as the darkness spread like an ink stain. Fallon experienced the disorienting sensation of slipping forward, passing through the membrane of those eyes, and into Thalia’s mind, wrapped in an enfolding darkness that threatened to encompass everything. By the grace of an ever narrowing gap, the outside world remained visible, available to Thalia. Every day, each hour, was a struggle to keep the darkness at bay. It was an exhausting inner battle, a consuming struggle to remain in the light, and it left room for nothing else. Thalia was burning up from within, and, at times, envisioned herself as a hollow woman, a shell of who she had been, a negligible piece of flotsam clutched by the frozen fingers of a sailor after a nighttime shipwreck at sea. Drowning in darkness, she clung to her life and her identity with all her remaining effort, focusing on the smallest source of light—and hope—to keep herself alive, if adrift. Thalia had survived her ordeal in the rift. That’s all her family knew, and in their ignorance, that was sufficient for them. But Fallon now understood Thalia’s secret: her battle wasn’t over. She had survived until now, but she had not yet won. And deeper still, the truth that Thalia kept even from herself. She was losing that battle. It was only a matter of time before the darkness won. Like someone who initially survives exposure to high levels of radiation only to die later from the cumulative effects of radiation poisoning. Poisoned by darkness, leeched of life and sanity and identity until only a void remained, until the brittle shell crumbled into dust.

  Fallon shuddered with this premonition and the motion was like an electric current snaking down her arms, through her hands, and into Thalia’s body. When Thalia whimpered in fear, Fallon cursed herself for letting the insight overwhelm her. Sometimes the roller coaster elicits an involuntary scream out of the rider. Hang on, she told herself. This isn’t about me.

  Without thinking about her actions, Fallon leaned closer and Thalia followed suit. Until their foreheads touched. The sudden warmth of contact revitalized Fallon and calmed Thalia.

  Better, Fallon told herself. Now what? For a moment, she had a vision of the Vulcan mind meld from the Star Trek television series. That was fingers to face, though, not forehead to forehead. My mind to your mind, Thalia, Fallon thought. She had to discover what Thalia needed, which was knowledge unknown to Thalia herself. Fallon had to infer that knowledge somehow. From what she saw in her eyes. In the darkness.

  “Yes,” Fallon whispered so softly she was sure only Thalia had heard.

  Fallon projected her own light, her own hope, into the other woman’s psyche, pushing with her mind, pushing against the weight of the darkness that cloaked Thalia’s thoughts in consuming and unforgiving shadows. Fallon imagined heavy draperies drawn across floor to ceiling windows, admitting no light into the grand room of Thalia’s mind. Then Fallon imagined herself grabbing the dusty cloth and ripping it aside, imagined the purifying rays of the noonday sun blasting through that room and banishing darkness.

  Thalia gasped, and for a moment, her eyes rolled back in her head.

  Fallon clutched her hands, maintaining physical contact at three points, both hands and forehead. The hazel eyes lowered and stared back into Fallon’s eyes. But
they were different now. Brighter, livelier, almost challenging. And crinkling at the edges now—as Thalia smiled at her.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Fallon felt a moment of exhilaration and a lump in her throat. She imagined she was now seeing Thalia as she had been before the rift crossing, when she had been whole and free of the inner darkness. But it was no more than a moment, because Fallon could still see deep into those vibrant eyes and what she saw worried her.

  “Are you okay?” Thalia asked, completely alert now and a quick study. She’d noticed Fallon’s misgivings as echoed in her body language.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Fallon said hastily, looking away to conceal the truth. The connection, the openness between them, was a two-way street. Fallon had to raise her guard lest her concerns undo whatever good she had accomplished.

  She doesn’t need to know what I know, Fallon reasoned. Not yet, anyway.

  “Okay,” Logan said. “What just happened?”

  Thalia stood, offered a hand to Fallon to help her up, then smiled at her brother. “Logan, you really need to start paying attention.”

  “What—? I was, but—”

  “It’s okay,” Fallon said, patting Logan’s shoulder. “She’s jerking your chain.”

  “Thalia?”

  “At least you remember my name,” Thalia said, patting his cheek. “That’s a start.”

  “Curious,” Ambrose said, rubbing his jaw as if trying to decide which of a hundred questions he should ask first. “Would either of you young ladies care to enlighten us as to what has transpired here?”

  “That’s what I asked,” Logan said defensively.

  “Can’t you tell?” Gideon said, smiling. “She’s back.”

  “While I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth,” Ambrose said. “The actual mechanism of this… recovery fascinates me.”

  “Trade secrets, Fallon,” Thalia said, chuckling. “Don’t say a thing.”

  Fallon looked at Ambrose and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “But this is remarkable!” Ambrose said excitedly. “Surely you can be a little more forthcoming.”

  “I just decided to go with the flow,” Fallon said, displaying a pleased grin. “Flying by the seat of my pants, I guess.”

  She was telling the truth, if not the whole truth. Because she was reluctant to explain the details about what she had seen and done beneath the surface of Thalia’s troubled mind, at least not while in the woman’s presence.

  Gideon cleared his throat to get their attention. He tapped his eye patch with an index finger. “Hate to be a buzz kill, guys, but could we turn our attention to the matter of my impaired visual acuity.”

  “Oh, right,” Thalia said. “The artificial eye. That was quite a while ago.” She steepled her fingers in front of her mouth as she looked down, deep in thought. Fallon had the ridiculous notion that she was about to conjure the eye out of thin air. But Thalia looked up suddenly and snapped her fingers. “Just remembered where Liana stashed it! Be right back. Wait here.”

  After she left the office, Ambrose heaved a sigh and leaned against his desk. “That was remarkable, Fallon. You can’t possibly know how grateful I am. We are truly in your debt.”

  “Just trying to help—”

  “Nonsense,” Ambrose interrupted. “This is no time for modesty. I never thought it was possible, never thought we would get back the old Thalia. Frankly, I’m ashamed to admit it now, in light of your stunning success… this reversal of fortune. All I can say is thank you, and—well done!”

  “He’s right,” Logan said. “It’s incredible.”

  “What the kid said,” Gideon added. “Sorry I doubted you.”

  “That’s okay, but,” Fallon began, then sighed. “You don’t know much about what happened to her, do you?”

  “It’s always been a touchy subject,” Ambrose said, “as you must have realized by your earlier interaction with her. Maybe that’s past. Maybe she can finally tell us what happened to her in that rift.”

  “Probably not a good idea.”

  “What do you mean?” Ambrose asked. The smile on his face almost faltered, but he seemed determined to cling to the buoyant mood created by Thalia’s recovery.

  Everyone was in such good spirits about Thalia’s apparent total recovery that Fallon was loath to spoil the mood. And for what? It’s not as if they could change what happened, what would eventually happen. She decided it might be best to let them enjoy Thalia’s return, at least for a while. The fate of Liana and Barrett was on their minds. And that was more than enough for now. Fallon was hopeful that she would have another session with Thalia, more time to try to understand what plagued the woman’s psyche. In the meantime, she felt the need to warn them in some way.

  “Is there something you’re not telling us?” Gideon asked.

  “What she’s been through ravaged her,” Fallon said, directing her gaze at Gideon’s physical scars, hoping he would understand. “She may be better”—for now—“but it’s something she’ll never forget.”

  “Ah,” Ambrose said, nodding. “Best not to pick at a fresh scab.”

  “We need to keep her with us,” Fallon said and knew instantly that it was true. “Asking her to dig into that… pit of darkness would be the same as driving her away.”

  “And back into the darkness,” Logan said, coming closest to her unspoken truth.

  “Combat veterans have triggers,” Gideon said, “sensory cues that cause flashbacks.”

  “Post traumatic stress is an apt analogy,” Ambrose said. “Rest assured, Fallon. We will be mindful of that. More to the point, we need her here now, in the present, more than we need to know the particulars of her rift crossing in the past.”

  Fallon felt as if a weight had been removed from her shoulders. If they didn’t pressure Thalia, Fallon might have time to try again, to finish what she’d started. For now, her half-truths would have to suffice. “Could I have a glass of water,” she asked. “Suddenly I’m parched.”

  “No problem,” Logan said. “I’ll go—”

  At that moment, Thalia returned carrying two items: a velvet drawstring pouch and a rectangular lacquered box. After placing the wooden box on Ambrose’s desk, she loosened the drawstrings of the pouch and removed an object wrapped in white muslin. Carefully, she peeled back the layers of cloth, revealing a smooth white orb—the artificial eye—with an iris the same pale blue as Gideon’s good eye.

  “Not bad,” Gideon said. “What’s in the box? The remote control?”

  “Not exactly,” Thalia said, taking that as her cue to open the lacquered box. Inside, resting in a molded bed of red velvet, was a silver ritual knife.

  “It’s glowing,” Fallon whispered.

  “Uh-huh,” Thalia said, pleased with herself. “I performed the necessary spell upstairs. Wanted to, um, shake the rust off my technique.”

  “As long as the knife isn’t rusty,” Gideon said, “I don’t care. What’s next?”

  Thalia picked up the lambent knife and turned it back and forth, admiring her spell-craft. The eerie light rippled and flowed across the surface of the blade as if with a will of its own. She looked up at Gideon with a mischievous glint in her eyes. “You need to donate some blood.”

  Chapter 42

  After Thalia told Gideon to roll up his sleeve and present his forearm, Fallon hastily said, “Hey, I’m feeling a little lightheaded so, if nobody minds, I’ll make my way into the kitchen for that glass of water.

  “Oh, sorry, Fallon. Forgot about that,” Logan said. “But you don’t need to stay for this. Actually, I don’t need to stay for this either.”

  “I only need a little blood,” Thalia assured them. “Just enough to coat the artificial eye. And that will be absorbed into the eye within moments.”

  “We’ll file that under TMI,” Logan said. “For ‘too much information’ for the newbie.”

  “Bye now,” Fallon said with a finger wave. She grabbed her backpack by one o
f its straps. “Enjoy your, um, blood ritual.”

  “This is fascinating,” Ambrose said as he turned his full attention to the magical proceedings. “I was completely unaware Liana had planned this.”

  “Liana and I were never sure it would work,” Thalia said, then added quickly for Gideon’s benefit, “but we were reasonably confident of success. Now, Gideon, after the eye absorbs the blood, you and only you may touch and insert the eye. It must imprint on your physiology. Otherwise it will be no better than your current artificial eye.”

  “Understood,” Gideon said in a tone of nervous excitement.

  “Let’s go,” Logan said to Fallon, placing his hand on her shoulder while glancing back at the others.

  “I don’t need an escort,” Fallon said. “If you’d rather stay.”

  “That’s not it,” Logan said. “I recently had an encounter with a disembodied eye, and, if I stick around, it’s entirely possible I’ll have an unpleasant flashback myself.”

  Logan closed the office door as if he’d just managed to leave a fussy baby asleep in a nursery. Off Fallon’s quizzical look, he shrugged and said, “Common courtesy.”

  Fallon had another idea. She thought that maybe Logan hadn’t adjusted to Thalia’s improved mental state and continued to see her as fragile and combustible, which might explain why he was walking on eggshells around her. Unless, that is, he suspected something. Perhaps his paranormal talent had kicked in. He doused for supernatural trouble spots. And Thalia’s psyche certainly qualified as one.

  She waited until they were settled in the kitchen, each holding a chilled bottle of water from the refrigerator, before she said anything. “So…. What do you think?”

  “I meant what I said. About the eye.”

  “And what about Thalia?” Fallon asked, taking an extended sip from the water bottle to mask her intense interest in his response. In a way, it would almost be a relief.