by Thomas Page
And Irwin Bickel laughed and laughed, leaving the doctors and nurses nonplussed and rather offended, confirming their worst thoughts that project engineers were at heart soulless bastards who viewed death as nothing more than the breaking down of a machine.
Nora had invited a man to accompany them to Santa Eulalia, a huge bear of a Mexican wearing a thick mustache, a merry smile that contrasted with his otherwise reserved personality, and work clothes. He was at breakfast talking in a low voice to Nora when they came in and he stopped talking immediately to greet them.
“Larry and Kate, this is Armando, a dear, dear friend of mine. He will be coming with us.”
Armando stood, shook Dutton’s hand, and bowed over Kate’s. He offered her a chair. English muffins, an assortment of jams, and coffee had been set out.
“Are you in Nora’s psychic society?” asked Kate sitting down.
“No,” he answered. That was all Armando had to say about it.
As Kate and Dutton ate, Nora excused herself and went outside with Armando to a pickup truck. Through the window, Dutton glimpsed the Mexican loading a gasoline tin on the back of his truck.
“We’ll stop on the way,” said Nora. “Best to take our time and be rested when we get there.”
Nora insisted they take two separate vehicles. Dutton and Kate drove in their car, Nora and Armando in his truck. They stopped at the Chinese restaurant in Santa Monica which Forrester had frequented and the waiter recognized Kate. “Have you spoken to Mr. Forrester?” he asked anxiously.
Kate replied that she had, once or twice.
“What is wrong with him? Everyday he looks in here and then goes away. He speaks to nobody, he says nothing.”
Kate said something about Forrester going through a period of trouble in his life. After the waiter was out of earshot, Nora whispered, “Forrester is repeating the major activities of his life. He must have come here a lot.” Dutton tried unsuccessfully to engage Armando in conversation, but no one was feeling sociable.
They made Santa Eulalia by midafternoon. Nora contacted the Realtor and with giggles and babble—Dutton by now realized she was faking that behavior—induced him to turn over the keys again. He recognized Kate, who had thoughtfully taken her camera from her bag. “That house is worth chickenshit,” he said. “It’s not fair.”
Armando asked Kate to show him around the basement. Nora waited with Dutton as they poked around downstairs. Dutton said, “Kate saw him in late afternoon. Something tells me we won’t have to wait till midnight.”
“Oh, I know,” she answered. “Any minute, Dr. Dutton. Are you ready?”
“Oh, yes, ready as ever.”
“Good. Let me see how your machine works.”
Dutton placed the oscilloscope on the floor and switched it on. He explained to Nora that the hissing cartridge was playing Gareth Jones’s compressed brain waves into a module in the oscilloscope and that once the oscillator now filling the room with millions of vibrations mixed in a blip with the waves, it would produce a sine wave on the screen.
As he talked, Kate came in the room with Armando. To Nora, Armando said, “So I shall make things ready. It should only take half an hour.”
“Good,” she answered. Armando walked outside to his truck and returned bearing an armload of tarpaulin. Nora said to them. “Never you mind what he’s doing, it’s just a favor to me. Dear, dear, I don’t suppose any of you brought along a deck of cards, did you.”
They sat in the corner room, backs against the bare walls, listening to Armando putter around the basement. Using her handbag as a pillow, Nora Stone curled up on the floor and immediately fell asleep. Armando came back up after an hour and seated himself on the floor opposite them, protectively close to Nora Stone. They waited and watched the green oscilloscope screen. Dutton thought he could sense the millions of cycles it was sending into the room. He rubbed Kate’s shoulders as she rested her back against his raised knees. Armando cracked his knuckles as he watched the screen. The sun slowly went down into darkness, casting feeble shadows into the room. The last glint of light came from the gold crucifix Armando wore around his neck under his half-open shirt.
By Dutton’s watch, Daniel Forrester entered the house at eight-thirty-five, ten minutes after Nora awoke with a yawn and a sigh. They had set electric lanterns on the floor which gave off a small courageous glow against the assaulting darkness. Dutton had just stretched his muscles by walking round the room and Kate was trying to snooze on her rolled-up jacket.
On the oscilloscope, Dutton, Nora, and Armando saw the rigid green line kink up in the middle into the shape of a soft cone. Nora clasped her hands in joy and Kate awoke with a violent start as the air turned cold and the walls erupted with the sounds of clattering feet and scratching fingers. Armando reached for his crucifix and Nora patted his hand.
Down the hall came the sound of footsteps.
“Get ready, everybody,” said Nora.
They climbed to their feet. Dutton wondered why Forrester sometimes walked, sometimes propelled himself by God knew what astral power. Perhaps he retraced his steps from childhood.
They faced the doorway in a semicircle as Forrester stepped into the frame. He looked at Kate and immediately cracked a dazzling smile.
“Kate,” he said.
He was not as solid as Dutton had thought in Clayton. Forrester seemed to move, to float in the doorway, just as an object might shift in one’s vision when tears form on the surface of the eye.
Calmly Nora said, “Talk to him, Kate,” while holding Armando’s hand. Armando crossed himself and regarded the apparition with pure loathing.
“Daniel, go away.”
“Kate,” said Daniel Forrester as if he did not hear her.
“Daniel, I don’t love you. I will never love you.”
“Kate,” repeated Daniel Forrester, with that horrid, hungry smile on his face.
Kate’s voice rose as she realized she was not getting through to him. “I love Larry, not you. There’s no reason for you to bother me anymore.”
“Kate.”
Despairingly Dutton realized this would never work; Daniel Forrester was incapable of responding to anything they said or did. Even Dutton’s presence did not affect him. He seemed completely unaware that anyone else was in the room.
Nora said, “Kate, you have to keep at him.”
Kate took a deep breath and addressed the smiling apparition again. “Daniel, listen to me. Leave me alone. I don’t ever want to see you. I don’t love you. Can’t you understand that? I will never be with you because I don’t want to. You cannot have me, ever. Never. Not alive or dead.”
For a moment, it seemed to be working, for Forrester was silent and he even seemed to fade a bit, leaving his smile behind. Then he said, “Kate.”
The racket in the house began again and Dutton felt the temperature fall even lower. Confused, he looked over at Nora, who was looking around the room. Her eyes fixed on the corner behind the doctor. She squinted and tried to make something out.
Forrester’s smile disappeared as though wiped out with a rag. He looked behind Dutton at the same corner which held Nora’s attention. Finally Dutton glanced down at the oscilloscope and his heart seemed to lurch to a stop.
There were two sine waves on the screen, a second smaller one gathering height perhaps an inch from the one representing Daniel Forrester.
Dutton whirled around and looked at the wall. The air was blank.
Nora said, “There’s someone in here . . . trying to materialize . . . a man . . .”
Armando cursed, covered his face, and backed against the wall, talking rapidly to himself in Spanish. Kate jerked around and looked at the wall. “Another one? Who?”
“I’ve never seen him before,” said Nora, her eyes moving around the wall. “He’s got black hair and . . .” The tone of her voice changed. �
��He’s full of hate . . . I can feel it. . . . He’s weaker than Forrester, but so much rage . . .”
“For who? Us?”
Nora gazed in awe at Daniel Forrester’s ghost shimmering in the doorway. “For Mr. Forrester, I think.”
On the green screen, the small sine wave crept toward Forrester. The two touched, exploding the screen into a nova of static brain waves. From Forrester’s figure came an engulfing sheet of thick blue light whose shock wave blew the walls and ceiling outward into pinwheeling chunks of plaster and insulation and slapped them to the floor.
Dazed, they picked themselves up from the wreckage and ran into the hall. Just above the stair bannister, the light blasted into their eyes again, spinning the wooden rails of the bannister down the hall toward them and knocking out the window glass. Twice more the light blazed in the house, once downstairs and once in the other bedroom. With each blast, they became aware of voices that were becoming louder and louder. On the steps, Dutton saw a group of shadowy figures, indistinct, slightly transparent, becoming more and more solid with each explosion.
And suddenly they were not alone in the hall. They were buffeted by swarms of people, thousands of voices jabbering at the same time, people shouting and laughing, clogging the stairs, shifting in and out of the rooms in constant confusing motion.
Nora Stone cried, “Hold hands! They can’t hurt us. Walk to the stairs.” Slowly they pushed through the swarms of figures down the hall, elbowing, kicking and nudging their way through the bodies.
Standing between a couple of chatting women was Gareth Jones holding the oscilloscope, his saturnine face desperate with urgency. He passed the machine over to Dutton and forced it into his hands. “Take it,” Jones shouted above the melee. “I’m depending on you.” Dutton tried to reach out to him but a clump of elderly men swept him away to oblivion.
Suddenly, with a final flash of light from the corner room, the visitation ended. They were standing in the hall of an empty deserted house. The only sound was that of a car horn outside.
“Jesus Maria,” breathed Armando.
Nora breathed, “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is very dangerous.”
Dutton dashed back into the corner room and picked up the oscilloscope. He felt a curious lassitude, a muscular fatigue and lightheadedness. Half of that crowd came from inside of his own head. Jones had said ghost witnesses experienced exhaustion after their encounters, leading theoreticians to think the witnesses contribute energy to the apparition. How nice of Jones to wrap it all up in a neat package, Dutton thought. Any more onslaughts like that and they could all end up with severe mental damage.
“How could that happen?” he asked Nora Stone.
“It can’t,” said Nora. “Jung once saw dozens of figures in his home, but nothing as concrete as this. I must check the society’s files.”
Armando spoke a stream of Spanish that made Nora’s eyes light up. “Armando, that’s very good. Armando thinks Mr. Forrester’s enemy did not realize Forrester was dead when he died himself. Armando says Forrester is the strongest spirit he’s ever seen. What did Forrester do to him?”
“He must have murdered him,” replied Dutton. “Like he killed Jameson and Jones, only they already knew he was dead. Whoever this guy is didn’t and came after him anyway.”
“It wasn’t one of your doctors?”
“Absolutely not.”
Kate looked as though she were about to say something but changed her mind.
“What is it, Kate?”
“Never mind,” she replied, wiping her face with a shaking hand. “It didn’t work, did it. I didn’t get through to him at all.”
Nora glared at her. “It doesn’t matter dear. Somebody else is after him. Somebody . . .”
Dutton exploded. “Let’s get the hell out of here, we can figure it out later.”
Dutton started walking down the stairs, Armando directly behind him. With a shivering crackle and a blast of arctic wind, Daniel Forrester came back into the house, alone, having presumably shaken off his adversary. He was walking up the steps, his face suffused with hatred, coming directly toward the doctor.
“Dutton.”
Dutton felt Armando’s hands grab his shoulders and pull him backwards. Dutton raised the oscilloscope over his head and flung it at Forrester. The machine passed cleanly through him and hit the floor in a splatter of circuit boards and a puff of acrid gas from the screen.
Forrester had picked up a half-ton LS capsule and yanked it out of the floor. The hands that grasped the doctor round the waist felt substantial enough to make Dutton’s body a mere dust mote in comparison. It isn’t fair, Dutton thought despairingly. He can touch me, but I can’t touch him.
“Get away from her,” Daniel Forrester roared.
Dutton heard Kate scream as he felt himself picked up off the steps and held over Forrester’s head. He saw the smashed oscilloscope at the foot of the steps and he remembered what Nora had told him. This is not happening, this is in my head, this is a delusion like the capsule being thrown at me.
Daniel Forrester flung Dutton so hard his body smashed head first into a broken heap on the floor and skidded into the wall.
CHAPTER 17
The pain was intense but short-lived, Dutton’s consciousness seeping away like the blood that seeped through his broken body. He knew precisely what injuries he had, the smashed head and broken back, the shattered ribs and fractured neck. He saw Kate screaming obscenities at Daniel Forrester, who vanished in a violent blast of light as his enemy found him again. He watched the house being blown to pieces, the stairs giving way as Kate, Nora, and Armando scrambled back upstairs to solid ground.
Now he could clearly see the man who was trying to kill the unkillable. He was a thin, sad-faced man in his thirties with a faded T-shirt and jogging shoes. Jogging shoes: even the dead need exercise, what a grand thought. The two figures did not chase each other, they clicked together in those fulminating blasts of light, their faces revealing that uncomprehending blankness that the mentally driven or obsessed display.
Dutton tried to move his fingers and his toes, but he felt nothing anymore, not pain or the coldness of the house or even his own body. He knew his spinal cord must have been broken. Blood poured from his mouth and spread out on the floor in front of his eyes.
Voices filtered into his consciousness, familiar ones, calming gentle whispers and encouragements. His uncle’s voice was reassuring him after he nearly drowned in a stream when he was four. His mother was coming up the walk to their house, her arms laden with birthday toys. He was making love to Lisa in the library of the medical school the night before exams. Over all these voices was a steadily growing buzzing sound that seemed to emanate from everywhere.
Then without an actual sensation of movement, Dutton felt himself hurtling through a spiraling, elastic tunnel, sucked through at tremendous speed toward an ever-enlarging opening, the buzzing noise filled his head.
He burst out of the tunnel and found himself standing on some kind of suspension in the house several feet off the floor. He looked down at his own body with clinical detachment, noting the badly angled neck, the broken ribs, and shattered head. There was no hope for that guy at all.
The house was filled with vivid, softly detonating lights through which he could make out figures of Kate sobbing hysterically, Nora Stone, her face congealed with shock, and Armando lying full-length on the steps, his body concealing something. Woodwork and plaster continued flaking down on them. The stairs were all but impassable with debris. I do love you, Kate. Yes, I do, but I’m all right now.
There was nothing Lawrence Dutton could do, so he let himself flatten into a manta-ray shape that became a soaring. The house and the people huddled on the stairs darkened away to oblivion. As he flew Dutton became aware of voices that talked soothingly to him in words too crystalline to be spoken by mouths.<
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Dutton looked around. Lights slid in and out of his vision and he heard Evan Branch and Jameson and Jones and thousands of others. Surrounded by a colossal babble, Dutton flew on, faster and faster, further and further.
Ahead of him, he could see Summerland, a titanic ocean of thick, entwining colors into which all of these glorious living lights drained like stars plunging into the center of Creation and out again. As Dutton was about to plunge into it, something tenuous, like filament wire which gave but did not break, barricaded him.
Dutton knew he had seen this place before at the furthest edges of his dreams, in the occasional streak of enlightenment while walking in the woods or facing the ocean, but now he could not reach it.
The buzzing sound came back, tearing through his senses. Dutton gasped and wept as the buzzing separated him from Summerland. It was Daniel Forrester next to him, speaking to him. Dutton had to go back to Kate, it was not time for him to come here yet. Of all the infinite ranks of celestial beings and living light in this limbo, Daniel Forrester who had sent him here was the only one sending him back. No words were spoken, even thoughts were too coarse a phrase to describe their communication, but Forrester won. Dutton had to go back, he could not stay here. Dutton screamed at Forrester, he raged at Forrester to go away, to let him be a part of eternity, but Forrester relentlessly pulled Dutton back. Don’t be afraid, you’re going back now. There’s a purpose in all this.
Lawrence Dutton died twice within ten minutes, the first time when he left the earth, the second time when he returned to it. The second was by far the worse, for he saw Summerland fade. He thought it was good that people did not understand death, else they would like it too much.
The edge of the stair was digging into Dutton’s cheekbone and he could smell the sweat from Armando’s body on top of him. Armando raised his head and rolled off. Shorn of the Mexican’s weight, Dutton allowed himself to slide a couple of steps down. Then he felt the lighter, warmer pressure of Kate on him, crying softly, her hot face against his neck, her small arms surprisingly strong round his chest. Instinctively he tried to comfort her by patting her head but that was as futile a gesture as any he had ever made.