A Charmed Place

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Canvases on stretchers, some of them blank and the rest of them failures, were stacked up against the wall opposite his bed, flaunting his collapse as an artist. Once upon a time his canvases had served him well. "Come and see my paintings," he'd suggest to an aspiring student, and into the bedroom she'd stroll. But these were a joke. He'd die before he'd show them to anyone.

  He rubbed his temples. The headache was back and he was due at the lab. He was convinced that his headaches were psychosomatic nowadays; whenever he knew he was going to be tested, he felt one coming on. Still, he was also convinced that he could make it go away. It was just a question of mind over matter, and he knew that his mind was more powerful than most.

  That's what they're paying me for, he told himself grimly as he threw back the covers.

  He went through his morning routine, unable to shake the sickening sensation that he'd just raped his ex-wife. When he wiped away the steam on the bathroom mirror, the haggard face that stared back at him looked guilty. After breakfast, when he caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror: guilty. In the rearview mirror of his beloved BMW: guilty. Even in the glass doors of the Brookline Institute of Research and Parapsychology, the face that looked back at him as he grabbed the door handle said guilty.

  "Good morning, Mr. Regan; hot enough for you?" asked the department secretary as she nudged the visitors' book toward him.

  He had no idea whether it was hot or not. He glanced back through the glass doors out at the parking lot across the street. The cars looked hot.

  "A real scorcher," he said with an amiable smile as he signed his name.

  He walked down one of several long halls, all of them painted dreary mint green and separated from beige linoleum floors by mopboards of black vinyl. The off-putting smell of disinfectant persisted as he pushed through swinging steel doors into a lab whose purpose seemed vague. There were no porcelain-topped tables, no sinks, no Bunsen burners. Nothing but four steel desks, each of them accompanied by a small cart and two chairs with plastic seats and metal legs.

  An EEG machine standing next to the middle desk, a computer on the same desk, and a video camera mounted high on one wall were the only electronics in the room. Everything else was surprisingly low tech: green boards, washed clean of chalk, on the long wall; folding screens stacked in a corner; a brown metal locker that Michael knew held printer paper and other stationery supplies.

  The room was windowless. Only the wall opposite the swinging steel doors had any glass, and that glass was tinted. Michael had never been on the other side of that wall, but he knew that he'd been observed during every one of his tests by someone or other—faculty; parapsychologists; government observers.

  Call it intuition, he thought with grim humor.

  With an upward nod of his head he greeted the lab assistant seated at one of the middle desks. "Hey, Stuart. How's it hangin'?"

  The goateed grad student, scruffy in jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, grinned and said, "Higher, after last night."

  "Hot date, hey?"

  "Cookin'."

  "Good for you. Well, what's on my plate for today?" Michael asked, wanting to get it over with. The testing, once fascinating to him, had seemed numbingly repetitive in the last few weeks. The initial excitement was fading, replaced by the growing realization that success would be neither overnight nor automatic. It was a little like being in third grade again, and having to do multiplication tables over and over and over until he got them right.

  And they wanted him to get it right. He had no illusions about that. Geoffrey Woodbine, Director of the Institute, had impressed upon him how important it was that he, Michael Regan, get it right. The Institute was testing half a dozen other subjects with supposed psychic powers, and of them all, he, Michael Regan, had consistently scored the highest.

  He wasn't surprised to hear it. All his life, he'd been aware that he was psychic. He had never done much with the gift; the circles he moved in were too cynical for that. But in the last several years he had read a lot, and had tested himself, and had gone so far as to respond to a discreet ad placed in the Journal of Psychic Phenomena seeking subjects for various studies.

  Call it middle age, call it the millennium—but here he was. Was he good enough for the Pentagon to keep the spigot of funds flowing? Absolutely.

  "We're going to work with lights today," announced Smart, dropping Michael into an instant funk.

  Lights. Lights were the least exciting of all. On. Off. On or off. On, on, off, off. That was it. Try to visualize the little red light on the panel behind the tinted windows as either glowing or dark. That's all he had to do. After the first fifty or so responses, he would find it almost impossible to keep his attention keyed up to the level necessary for testing his psychic powers. Had the great seers in history squandered their gifts divining about lit and unlit candles?

  I think not, Michael decided, allowing only a lift of an eyebrow to express his boredom and displeasure.

  Nonetheless, he let himself be hooked up to the EEG electrodes that would read his bodily functions while he tried to identify the status of the little red light on that panel behind the glass.

  "We're going to do it a little differently today," Stuart said as he taped the last electrode to Michael's forehead. "The light will be triggered by random number generating software rather than manually by another research assistant."

  "Whose idea was that?" Michael asked, surprised.

  "The government's. They want to tighten our methodology. Dumb shits. What do they know about methodology?"

  "I take it they're not here today?" Michael said with a gingerly, wired-in nod toward the tinted glass. Stuart wouldn't be so candid if they were monitoring his remarks.

  "They'll be here, don't worry," the graduate student said.

  Michael frowned. Why change the game plan now? If the Pentagon were satisfied with the progress of the project so far, they wouldn't be tinkering with the setup. It could mean only one of two things: either they thought the results were too impressive and were trying to break him, or they were wildly enthusiastic and were trying to hurry the project along.

  Either way, he wasn't worried. He had what it took.

  Stuart placed the counting device on a low table to Michael's left, asked if he was comfortable, and then walked over to the door of the windowed wall, opening it to murmur something to someone in the viewing enclosure. After that he came back and locked the door from the lab into the hall, took a seat at the desk, and with one eye on the wall clock, said to Michael, "Two minutes."

  They sat in silence with Michael centering his thoughts during the countdown. He closed his eyes and kept them closed. He pictured the red light on the panel, pictured a small red glow. He pictured the small red glow, then the glow being extinguished. He felt his heartbeat slow and his mind begin to enter a zone barren of any other image but the red light on the panel. His breathing slowed and his mouth fell a little open, to draw in air more easily. He became utterly relaxed, as if he were floating in a warm, dark place. From a great distance he heard Stuart's voice, soft, feminine, almost erotic, say softly, "Begin."

  His mind stayed blank, a dark and formless place. For a long while it stayed that way, and then ... a small red glow. He saw it. He could hear the color red, broadcasting in the dark cavern of his mind. He pressed the counter, and when the dull red light faded to black, he drifted back into darkness.

  And waited.

  ****

  An hour later, Michael Regan, free of electrodes and free to go, stood up on shaky legs. Stuart said something to him, but Michael had no idea what. He was, as usual, entirely disoriented and more than a little afraid. He had been to a place where no man was, and the profound and deadly isolation had unnerved him. Alone, so completely alone ... he couldn't bear to be alone like that again. He would not submit to testing again.

  "Hey!" he heard Stuart yell.

  Dazed, Michael turned around in the hall and came back into the lab.

 
"Didn't you hear me?" the grad student asked. "Dr. Woodbine wants to see you in his office—which is that-away," he added, hooking his thumb down the hall.

  "I know the way," Michael mumbled. He reversed direction and started off toward the office, trying hard to shake off the oppression he felt. It took a few minutes, he reminded himself. But the oppression seemed deeper, the recovery longer, every time he was tested.

  The Director's office was a soothing oasis of books, plants, and mahogany in an otherwise sterile environment. Velvet moss green drapes with nothing to do but look good hung alongside lowered wood blinds that were themselves doing a fine job of blocking the summer sun. A dark hued Persian rug, undoubtedly of value, added one more layer of dignity to a room that was already intimidating, giving it the look and feel of a psychiatrist's office in a venerable building in downtown Boston. The room commanded respect and demanded confidences. Michael distrusted it.

  He sounded to himself like a schoolboy summoned to the principal's office as he said to the director, "Stuart said you wanted to see me."

  Woodbine's answer was pleasant, even jovial. "Yes, that's right, Michael. How goes the battle?"

  "You tell me," said Michael, refusing to be condescended to. He saw the computer printout opened on the desk and had no doubt that it contained the results of the morning's work. Woodbine had a remote hookup in a small closet adjacent to his office.

  "Today was ... interesting," the director suggested, tapping the printout and hedging his answer.

  If he was disappointed, he was far too good an actor to show it. Tall and fit, with a chiseled, handsome face topped by a mane of wavy silver hair, Dr. Geoffrey Woodbine had always struck Michael as the perfect candidate to play a patriarch on a daytime soap.

  "Interesting how?" Michael prompted, after a pause that went on a heartbeat too long. He hated that, hated the way he always leaped headlong into that trap.

  Woodbine was candid. "It won't surprise you that the results today were ... well... less than we had hoped. After all, the test was administered by computer. You and I both know that remote viewing depends very much on your being able to key on to a target. A human being administering the test makes a viable target, whether I'm doing the testing or someone else is. You can't be expected to score as well when that connection is severed in favor of a machine."

  Michael couldn't understand it. "I felt right on top of it today, Geoff. How much off last week's results was I?"

  "It's irrelevant, I'm telling you," the director said impatiently. "The important thing is, I've managed to make our friends from Washington understand that they've just thrown a massive bureaucratic wrench in the project."

  He scanned the printout in front of him with obvious distaste, then looked up. His eyes, movie star blue, looked troubled. "You know, we're so close ... so close. If those idiots hadn't tacked on this contingency," he said, smacking the printout with the back of his hand, "we'd have moved on to the next phase of testing today."

  "But they're paying the bills," Michael acknowledged.

  The director didn't need reminding. "Let me worry about that, Michael," he said coolly. "They have some excellent data in their hands right now, and once we deep-six these ludicrous results, we'll be back on track. I have no doubt, none at all, that the funding will be renewed next month."

  Michael wanted to know what the next phase of testing was, but he knew better than to ask. It would taint the credibility of the project if he were to be told. In any case, he almost didn't care. As long as they were done with the little red light. The director got up from his desk and put his hand on Michael's shoulder, guiding him with reassuring words to the door.

  "They're anxious, Michael. Extremely anxious." He lowered his voice and murmured, "They have something definite, something important, in mind for you. They need to know about you—and all of our test subjects, but really, you're the one who's front and center now. The thing is, they need to be convinced beyond a doubt. We're almost there, Michael! Almost there!"

  His voice betrayed a passion that Michael had not heard before. But the director quickly dropped back into cordiality and asked, as he always did, after Michael's family. Were they coming along, after the tragedy?

  "Without the press hounding them at every turn, they seem okay," Michael answered, still bitter over the way reporters had ridden roughshod over his daughter's feelings.

  Woodbine shook his head. "That was a nasty crime, nasty. So Tracey's back to normal?"

  "All things considered," Michael said halfheartedly.

  "Good. I'm glad to hear it." He paused, then said, "I have a reason for asking, as you well know."

  Michael did know. The Institute had received funding, this time from a private source, to study children with apparent psychic abilities in an effort to find out the effect that popular culture had on those abilities. But first the Institute had to line up a few children with psychic abilities.

  Months ago, Woodbine had suggested a preliminary interview with Tracey. Then, and on two other occasions, Michael had refused. Now he was forced to do so again.

  "I don't see my daughter as possessing any special powers," Michael said carefully. He had no desire to alienate Woodbine, but he had even less desire to deliver Tracey as a subject for testing. Who would be in the viewing room, anyway? The thought of strange men observing his little girl through a one-way window gave Michael the creeps.

  Urging his case, Woodbine said, "Surely you realize that gifts like yours run in families."

  "Not in my family," Michael said flatly. "I saw no evidence of it in my mother, and I never heard it said of my father. We've been all through this, Geoffrey," he added, edgy now in his exhaustion. All he wanted was to get out of there.

  "You're right, you're right," said Woodbine, slapping him on his shoulder in farewell. "But I want you to think about it. At least let me do a preliminary interview. If I could just—''

  "I said can we drop it, Geoff?"

  Woodbine pulled up short. "Of course," he answered with a cool nod of dismissal. He turned back to his office, and Michael, still bothered by the apparently disappointing results of the morning's testing, headed for the lobby to sign out.

  It wasn't until he was back in his car that he remembered, out of the blue, his phone call to Maddie on the day before.

  Maddie with Hawke! A surge of ugly, devouring jealousy rolled over him. How had he managed to put the thought of them together out of his mind all day? Obviously he'd been distracted, first by the nightmare, then by the test, then by Woodbine's pressure tactics. But all that was behind him for the moment, and the realization that Daniel Hawke was living in the lighthouse just a stone's throw from Maddie began to eat at him in earnest.

  Michael clamped his jaw tight. He decided that he must be pretty damned good at remote viewing after all, because he could picture, vividly, Maddie and Hawke together in her country kitchen.

  Vividly.

  Chapter 9

  "Hot, hazy, and humid, right through the Fourth—perfect!" said Joan, zapping the TV on Norah's granite counter into silence.

  She lifted the designer tea kettle off the Viking range and poured boiling water over a tea bag nestled in a china mug. "Of course, the high rollers won't be drawn unless the fireworks are spectacular," she told her two friends. "Which poses a problem. All we have is eight thousand dollars in the kitty, and for what we want, the Domenico Brothers would need thirty-five—and that's with a discount because one of them just married Trixie's cousin."

  Joan was Chairperson of the Committee for an Old-Fashioned Fourth; she should know. Maddie was vice-chairperson. She'd signed on when Dan Hawke was still dodging bullets somewhere back in Afghanistan, and she was much too far along to bail out now. Besides, she wanted to do right by the town; they deserved a Rilly Good Shew, as Ed Sullivan would say. And Tracey seemed to get a kick out of her mom being almost in charge of the fireworks. Apparently it gave her serious clout with the boys in her crowd.

  So Maddie planned t
o be on that beach by the lighthouse if it killed her. All she could do about Dan Hawke was hope and pray that he'd stay in his corner of the playground during the festivities.

  "I think I can scrape up another thousand for us," she volunteered. She'd just have to hit the phones a little harder.

  "Not enough," said Norah, tapping a pencil on her kitchen table.

  She chewed on her lower lip for a moment, then said, "Okay. Here's what we do. Put me down for two thousand. Tell the Brothers D. that they'll have ten more by the end of the week and the last fourteen before they light the first rocket. Tell them to make it big, make it bold, and make it red, white, and blue. No greens and no golds. We want to keep this as patriotic as possible. That way we'll draw the Republicans as well as the preservationists."

  As glorious as it all sounded, Maddie felt obliged to sound a note of caution as they relocated with their coffee and tea to the deck of Norah's villa.

  "Thirty-five thousand dollars is a huge amount of money for a town our size, Nor. Wouldn't we be better off putting it directly into the lighthouse foundation's coffers? It would help give us the jump start we need for the project."

  Norah was spinning her Rolodex like a Hollywood agent with a mortgage to pay. "Maddie, Maddie, Maddie," she said, flipping through the B's, "don't you know yet that you have to spend money to raise money? Keith Barnett. Yes!" she said, yanking the card from the Rolodex spine and moving on to the C's.

  Truly, the woman was a wonder. Peering over her shoulder, Maddie muttered, "Is there anyone in that thing who's poor?''

  Norah laughed and said, "Sure: my cleaning woman; my pool man; my first husband."

  "Since when is a veterinarian poor?" asked Joan, dunking her tea bag.

  "Since the divorce," Norah said without looking up.

  Shaking her head, Maddie went over to the wall of French doors and pressed a button, activating a massive roll-out awning to shade them from the rising sun. After that she settled in one of the deeply cushioned redwood chaises that were arranged facing the sweeping expanse of ocean that lay to the south of Norah's ivory-stuccoed, glass-walled, multilevel, multiwinged behemoth of a summer home, so totally at odds with the town's original and quite modest gray-shingled houses. Worse, she had started a trend: every new house to the west was as ostentatious as hers.