The Reach

by Nate Kenyon

  There was something almost sacrilegious about saying it in a church. Patrick didn’t seem to notice. He had a way about him that was very serious, very intense. “What did the hospital director have to say after this occurred?”

  “Storms had been forecast all day, severe weather warnings. The stones matched the ones used to landscape the hospital grounds. A tornado of some kind, a minicyclone—”

  “The ice,” Patrick interrupted. “Did it melt quickly? Were the stones themselves warm?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the temperature had dropped, you said?” She nodded. Patrick said, “I see.” He pulled out a notepad from his jacket pocket. “Do you mind? It’s easier if I write this down. We’ll go over it later.” He held the notebook in his palm and scribbled something with a stubby end of a pencil. “Hmmm. So the director, he’s asking you to believe that this storm came up out of nowhere, picked up a hailstorm of stones without doing any other damage to the grounds, and dropped them on the roof. Without damaging a single other person or object within a ten-foot radius?”

  “I don’t know half of what he said, to be honest. I was pretty shaken up, and I suppose he was too. I don’t know if he believed it himself. But you have to understand that Dr. Wasserman is a man of science.”

  “So am I.” Patrick edged slightly closer. She could not look away from his eyes, such strange eyes. “You know how ancient man worshipped the sun as a god because they could not understand the meaning of such a great, shining presence in the sky? Or that before they understood mental illness they believed in possession of the body by spirits?”

  “I’m not very good at this, Patrick. If it wasn’t for this girl…you might call me one of your skeptics.”

  “I’m only trying to make a point. I want you to entertain for a moment another possibility. This is quite scientific and utterly reasonable. Suppose that there are functions within the mind we have yet to understand. Perfectly rational, explainable abilities if only we knew how the process worked. In some cases these abilities are more advanced, more developed, the same as musical talent or physical coordination. A person might even be able to improve these abilities, strengthen them with practice.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The human brain contains over seventeen billion cells. Seventeen billion. These handle approximately one hundred million messages per second. There are many different areas of specialty inside the brain itself, and we understand the functions of a bare fraction. What are these other cells doing? Is it fair to assume that we have no idea? That we cannot even speculate? Look at your airplanes. And yet they’re so primitive compared to what we’ve been given. If you told anyone that you could build a machine with seventeen billion parts and make them all work fluidly together, and explain what each part does and how it does it, do you think they would believe you?”

  “Being in here inspires you, doesn’t it?”

  “It just serves as a reminder of what a gift we have. And it keeps me humble. There are many mysteries in the universe, and I’ve chosen to focus on just one of them, because to take them all on at once would be impossible.”

  They were very close now, knees touching.

  Deeper in the shadows above the altar was a life-size statue of Jesus on the cross. Patrick saw her looking at it. “We believe now that he was very likely a sensitive. Certainly telepathic, clairvoyant, quite possibly psychokinetic. It would explain a lot—his knowledge of future events, the power to heal, even walking on water.”

  “Rising from the dead?”

  Patrick smiled. “We’ve chosen to leave that particular miracle to the imaginations of the parishioners.” He touched the briefcase she still held on her lap. “This girl you’ve told me about, she may have a gift, a portion of the brain more developed than the average person. We’ve studied that here, and we’ve come to a few conclusions based on scientific method. One, these psychic abilities do exist. Two, they follow specific physical rules. And three, they are not as rare as you might think. But they are variable, much like personalities, and for the most part they are minute, measurable only in a laboratory setting.”

  “But not always?”

  “Stories like yours have been told for centuries. A mother who suddenly has the strength to lift an overturned car. A grandfather clock stopping at the exact moment of someone’s death. A rain of stones. Generally they happen only once or twice in a lifetime, and so it is very hard to document them. A person who can perform at such a high level over time is extremely rare.”

  “You asked me if the stones were warm.”

  “If you’ll recall from your early physics classes, it takes energy to create motion. If something is being levitated, raised into the air, some force must be accountable for it. What we’ve concluded here—and it’s been documented in South Carolina and other places—is that psychokinesis involves some sort of heat transference at a microscopic level. In any successful PK experiment, the air temperature drops while the surface temperature of the moving object rises.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Neither do we,” Patrick said with a smile. “We don’t understand the process. But what is heat except the movement of molecules? Isn’t it possible that during a psi event, a person is somehow able to borrow motion and energy from moving particles—perhaps at the atomic level—and use that energy to affect a change in the environment?”

  “Anything’s possible.” Just don’t ask me to believe in the bogeyman. That would be next, Jess felt suddenly sure; she was careening down a path with no brakes and no map, without even an idea of where she might be at the end. I’ve never believed in anything my eyes couldn’t see. Maybe it was the way I grew up. Maybe it was Michael’s death. But I’ve got to believe the world has a set of rules. And this goes way beyond anything the world has ever shown me.

  But that wasn’t really true, was it? Didn’t she know just one split second before Michael ran out in front of that car, wasn’t there a single moment in time where she knew what was going to happen? Or was that just hindsight?

  “In your little girl’s case,” Patrick was saying, into the deep and heavy silence of the church, “she would have been pulling heat energy from the air and using it to exert force upon the stones. The resulting temperature drop causes moisture in the surrounding air to form ice almost instantly, even as the stones heat up. How did she do it? It’s difficult to say. There’s been a lot of study lately on brain wave activity and microparticles. But the fact is, we don’t know for sure.”

  “Would you take CAT scans in a case like this? MRIs? EEGs?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jess touched her briefcase and unsnapped the clasps. With slightly unsteady hands she withdrew the yellow folder. “This is her file,” she said. “What I’ve been allowed to see of it anyway. I’d like you to take a look and tell me what you make of it.”

  Patrick took the folder and withdrew the contents, spreading it across his lap. He studied in silence for a few moments, his eyes moving quickly across the pages of notes and reports. Then he held a transparent film up to the flickering light. “Here, you see a slight enlargement of the cerebral ventricles,” he said, pointing at a gray area. “And here. But no visible reduction in the hippocampus or hypothalamus. In fact, I’d say it’s enlarged.”

  “In other words, if they were looking for a neurobiological sign of schizophrenia, they didn’t find it.”

  “Mmm-hmm. And yet there are abnormalities.”

  Suddenly he stood up and went to the candles at the altar, holding the film up to the light and pacing, peering, his voice rising in excitement. “There’s definitely increased activity here. Let me see the rest of it.” He returned and fumbled through the records with more urgency. “You see, look at these readings. The patterns are positively abnormal. Ordinarily you would have a beta wave reading if the person was awake, delta if they were in deep sleep. Occasionally you might see an alpha or even a theta in a state of hypnosis. But in this case it
isn’t either, but rather a combination of the two, even when she’s supposedly awake. And in several instances”—he punctuated this with a tap of his long finger on a graph—” there’s a spike, a surge of terrific proportions. It’s as if someone jump-started her brain with a car battery.”

  “Have you ever seen anything like it before?”

  “Not like this.” Patrick seemed to lose himself for a moment. “I’d heard stories, seen hints, but nothing like this.”

  He turned to face her, leaned down, and smacked both hands on the back of the pew. He grinned. “Do you know what you’ve done? If what you’ve told me is true, and these records are accurate? Something we’ve been failing to do for years, with people like Bilecki, thousands of them.”

  Patrick clapped his hands together like a child. The sound was like a gunshot in the silent church. “You’ve found us our Holy Grail.”

  —21—

  Jess Chambers dreams she is in a large, cavernous building. The lights are all off, but emergency bulbs allow her enough light to see. Red light glints off polished metal doorknobs, shines dully from the stone walls, and turns the wooden trim as black as blood.

  She pauses to listen. Monsters are chasing her, and she does not know which way they have gone. Paranoia creeps like stealthy dark figures into her mind. She feels them around every corner, watching her from every door frame. She hears them running after her. But she is searching for something, and she cannot leave until she finds it.

  Jess hears her mother’s drunken voice echoing through the empty stone corridors; crashing into things, knocking over a lamp that shatters all over the floor, laughing and shouting. Glass tinkles and crunches. Others hissing at her to be quiet. A door opens somewhere close by. The sound of voices becomes very loud. Jess presses herself into a shadowed doorway, listening in a near panic as the footsteps become louder. She has nowhere to go. If they find her they will take her away and lock her up.

  She reaches behind her and turns the knob, stumbling into an open room. White carpet shows bloody footprints leading across a sea of broken and dissected toys, past a toy sink and through a plastic tunnel. Something seems to catch in her throat. What has she been looking for?

  She hears a noise over by the bookcase. A little boy stands with his back to her, his blond hair curling over his collar. Both arms are raised and she sees the blood running down his wrists and dripping onto the carpet.

  Michael?, she says. Her brother turns. Blood pulses from holes in both palms. The look on his face is one of sadness. She sees her mother in him. But something is missing. She does not see any trace of the autism that has plagued him from the moment he was born.

  Then the look changes. Suddenly she is afraid. Michael frowns, little furrowed brows coming together in a pantomime of adult emotion. He raises his hands higher. The door swings shut behind her with a bang. Papers pick themselves up off the carpet and whirl through the air. Michael’s shoulders shake, his eyes roll backward into his head.

  The plastic tunnel shivers, rocks, lifts into the air. Books slam against the walls and flop like broken birds. Glass shatters in the window with a crack like a lightning storm.

  Toys batter her face as a wind picks up and whips through the room. Glass shards flash like little silver arrows in the sun. Fists pound at the door, voices shout her name. She looks at her brother and sees the light of revenge in his eyes. She realizes too late, she hasn’t been running away from them, after all. She has been running away from him.

  Miles away, a little girl opens her eyes to inky darkness. Her throat is tight, her limbs slick with sweat. The dream remains with her, of a woman, and a little blond boy, and blood. Lots of blood.

  She tries to turn over, but her wrists and ankles are strapped down.

  Voices come to her like ghosts now, murmurs in an alien tongue. It is difficult to separate them from the things that happen inside her mind, these other voices that come and go and bring the dreaded gray fog. She isn’t sure right now whether any of them are real, or whether she is truly lost inside herself.

  The gray fog is a method of control, a weapon in battle, maybe the only one they have.

  She used to think about what might happen if someone came for her. She has only the faintest memories of a woman who might or might not have been her mother. Would this person care for her, would she take her away and soothe the voices, take away the pain? Would someone please, please help?

  She knows the woman in the dream she has just had, knows her face. But the truth is frustratingly out of reach. She was here recently. What has happened? Please, remember.

  But it does not come. There is only the dream, the terrible, bloody dream.

  Her head pulses slowly, throbbing with the pain of a thousand pinpricks. She is lost, and alone, and too weak to move. She lets out a single, choked sob, and lets the gray fog swallow her whole once again.

  She keeps her heart jealously guarded, and does not let it beat too loudly for fear that they will hear it.

  —22—

  Jess awoke into darkness close and cool, got up, and shuffled into the kitchen, hugging herself in the soft tick and hiss of early morning heat as the radiators sputtered to life.

  Okay, so suppose Patrick is right. Suppose for one moment that they’re not all off their rockers, that there actually is a portion (where? how?) of the human brain that is capable of exerting an effect on the outside physical world, simply by a particular sequence of thought.

  The question then became: where to go from here?

  Of course, Patrick wanted to see this miracle child right away. He was already mapping out a plan to test her, record the results, contact the people in Carolina and elsewhere. But it would not be that easy; there was Wasserman to contend with, for one. And it was important to consider what was best for Sarah.

  There was also the question of how far this talent could reach. There was still a big difference between levitating parlor tricks and the ability to bring the very walls down around their heads. A rain of stones. Or something larger. A little girl with a mind like that could be very valuable to the wrong people.

  Jess sat clutching a cup of tea at her kitchen table, while Otto rubbed his fluffy tail against her bare legs. Outside the window it was still dark, though it must be approaching dawn; she had not heard the trains running for a while now, and the traffic was almost nonexistent. Soon it would pick up as people resumed their daily lives, rushing into work so they could hurry up and go home again.

  As she sat there in the empty kitchen, the silence hit her like a backhanded slap. For some reason she thought of Patrick’s face, and she stood up and went to the sink. Not good to think about him now. She needed to focus.

  When she used to wake up like this as a child she would sneak out onto the front steps, hug her knees to her chest, and look at the stars. The stars were always larger and brighter in the country. If she tried very hard, she could find the answers there. The night sky gave her perspective. She would feel impossibly small in a universe of endless planets. Somewhere up among the stars, she felt sure, someone was looking back at her.

  At the window now, she leaned over and craned her neck to see if she could see the sky. She felt a moment of numb heat in her palm, before something bit down hard.

  She yelped and yanked her hand away from the still-hot coil on the stove, then pressed her palm to her mouth. Already the skin was throbbing. Damn it. Unreasoning anger welled up inside, the product of too much stress and lack of sleep, and as she turned to run her hand under cold water from the tap, her half-full mug of tea slid off the kitchen table and shattered on the floor.

  She stood for a few moments in disbelief. Brown liquid had spattered across the linoleum, up the front of the refrigerator and cabinets.

  Someone pounded on the floor from the apartment below and shouted at her. She swore to herself and went about cleaning up the pieces of ceramic, being careful not to cut herself on the sharp edges. Otto padded over and licked at the tea with a pink tongu
e. She grabbed a wet sponge from the sink and wiped all the surfaces down before he made himself sick on milk and sugar.

  When she had finished cleaning up the mess, she soothed her burn with an ice cube from the freezer. By then the sky had lightened with the coming dawn.

  The day was not off to a very good start. First the dream, then this. Somehow the shattered cup seemed to symbolize where her life had gone. And she still had to come to some sort of decision about Sarah. What was she going to do?

  Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. How do you think Isaac Newton felt? Or Ben Franklin?

  Okay. All right. But we’re losing track of what’s important here. Inside this hypothetical situation was a very real little girl. A girl who was confused and alone and very probably scared to death. No matter what happened, Jess would not allow a witch hunt. That was far too dangerous.

  Perhaps Shelley could help. Jess looked at the clock by her bed. After four; she considered calling anyway. Instead, she dialed Charlie’s number. She was surprised when Charlie seemed to be expecting her. She did not even mention the hour.

  “Patrick’s a good boy,” Charlie said. “He may be a little intense, but he’s honest.”

  “I know, Charlie, but do you trust him?”

  “Absolutely. Listen, you trust yourself, girl. Then let the rest come.”

  “Where would I be without your advice?”

  “I suppose you’d be happily married to a millionaire.”

  “I’d die first.”

  She could hear Charlie grinning through the phone. “Well, maybe you’d settle for a slightly mad scientist with a fetish for the paranormal. He’s single, you know.”

  “You don’t say. He is kind of cute. I think he’s carrying a torch for someone else, though.”