The Ethereal Vision

by Liam Donnelly

CHAPTER 2 — OPENING THE DOOR

  Jane walked home from school on a Thursday evening and winced at the icy breeze, the flurry of a beginning snowfall blowing around her. The school day and the people there she called friends were gradually fading from her mind as she got closer to her home. She thought about the growing distance between her and her school friends. She felt powerless to stop it, although strangely, it didn’t seem to bother her that much.

  They knew nothing of the abilities that lay dormant within her. She had made them dormant, of course. The man in the black coat in the park had shown her how… but was that real? Or had that been just a dream?

  On the walk home, she thought about this man in the long coat who had appeared in that other-worldly place—the place with the slow-moving river and the golden-coloured trees. It was a place she had tried to remember in the ensuing years, but as time passed the memories faded until there was nothing but dusty, tattered remains. Now it was like trying to read from an old, faded diary. Jane slowed down briefly as she said his name aloud.

  “Max.”

  For a moment, when she uttered the name, a golden vista-like paradise flashed through her mind. The world in front of her seemed unreal and, somehow, she felt as though she were dancing in some other beautiful place. There was motion and colour and light floating around her body. Then, a few seconds later, it was gone. She took a deep breath. Ice-like wind flowed through her lungs, bringing her back into the moment. She put one foot in front of the other and continued walking home as her thoughts returned to her everyday life.

  Her friends were preparing to enroll in university. Jane had entirely lost interest in her final year of school. She suspected, for some reason, that she would not be attending university at all. The online application forms had not been touched. Her mother had not even encouraged her to fill them in; it was something else that had become dormant.

  Then, once again, her thoughts returned to the strange man in the black coat. She became resolute that he had been there—either in a dream or some other kind of vision. Had her subconscious created an image, a character whose advice she could follow—a protective device of some sort? This thought crossed her mind frequently in the years that followed and, in particular, as she became older and started to develop a better understanding of such things.

  She knew one thing for certain: the thing that Max told her had protected her when the men in suits called to her family home looking for her. She squirmed at the thought of them and shook the memories from her mind as she turned a street corner.

  She recalled that time when she had allowed the psychic sense to soar like a pair of wings around her all the time. She had seen him in her mind then—the man who was coming to take her. She could see his name—Lucas—and when he was a mile away, she could see his face in the shaded vehicle as it came down the street. She had been afraid of him immediately. She wondered what would have happened during that altercation if Max had not intervened.

  She turned the corner off the main road in Ranelagh, a small town in the south of Dublin, and braced herself further against the wind and the flurry of snow that was now coming straight in her direction. The spectre of a man who had appeared in her childhood dreams still floated in and out of her mind.

  What do I know about him? she wondered. I know that he showed up in a dream and gave me some very helpful advice. He looked like he was in his early forties, maybe younger. He was nice; kind and gentle.

  There was an inch of snow on the ground now, and it crunched beneath her feet.

  Wise, she thought. He was definitely wise. She stopped walking for a moment as she suddenly remembered his eyes. They had been watery and icy blue. She gasped as she recalled that looking into them had given her the sense of looking into another universe. A shiver went through her. She was searching for another word to describe him, and she felt it come forward inside her mind: powerful. Max was powerful. Of that she was certain. She looked up and continued walking.

  Still can’t decide if he was real or not, she thought, and as she looked up and around her at the dark night, another thought followed, seeming to come from someplace deeper within her.

  He was Jane.

  The more she thought about such things, the more she felt as though a drama had always been unfolding in her life—she was part of it whether she wanted to be or not, whether she ignored it or not. For some reason, it was now revealing itself to her rapidly, in all its unimagined possibilities.

  By the time Jane reached the front door of her house the snowfall had slowed, but large flakes still fell over the orange street lights in a beautiful thick haze. She looked at the door knob and hesitated. For a moment she was transfixed by it. Light reflected off it with a golden, prismatic quality. All the way home she had been thinking about the man called Max, who had appeared to her once, helped her, and then never shown himself to her again.

  She thought about the ethereal abilities then, as she often did whenever Max entered her mind, which was seldom. Somewhere inside her, she felt those mental hands reach out tentatively to explore. They touched on something cold and concrete; a solid wall—it was a dam. She gasped when she felt this inside her, for she had no idea it existed. She recoiled from its image as it flashed in her mind. It was a huge mental structure, and the obvious question it posed about what it might be holding back was one she was, as yet, not willing to explore.

  She thought about her father—something she didn’t do often—and felt the familiar stirrings of guilt. She couldn’t remember much about the car accident that had caused him to retreat into a life of his own, for most of it had long since faded into shadows.

  She suspected that the man called Max had not wanted her to lock herself out from all ethereal ability completely; she had elected to do this herself, and over the years she had almost forgotten it was there. There had been moments, though, when she was reminded of it. She would reach for her coffee and it would automatically slide across the table into her hand. Or she would become frustrated at a noise coming from another room and her door would slam shut. She would forget these things as much as possible and move on quickly.

  There were men, though—and the suspicion was so strong it had become a knowing within her—sitting in front of computer screens somewhere across the planet, waiting for people like her to give them exactly what they wanted: a spike of psionic activity, a reason to come for her. How they detected it was not entirely within her understanding.

  She had read an anonymous forum post on a website one evening that had subsequently been removed. This post described how they were able to detect these spikes. It mentioned gamma waves and alpha waves—standard information about brainwave patterns—but it also went on to describe how there was something else among those who exhibited psionic ability, a different signature completely. It was something that seemed to echo across space.

  This post confirmed then what Jane had already suspected: it was virtually impossible to detect minor spikes in psionic activity—the slamming of a door, a minor telepathic incident, a sliding cup of coffee. These faded into the background like white noise.

  The people who were looking for her, though (and others like her), were indeed able to detect the larger macro manifestations. These showed up on their screens like freak waves on the surface of an ocean, unmissable and obvious. She had gotten away with one or two, when she threw the savage dog for instance. She and her mother had even talked about that once…but there had been others.

  Like when you lifted the car. That’s why he came looking for you…

  She reached for the doorknob with her mind and, as she did, a lock inside her opened. The weight she had been carrying over her shoulders all those years rose off her like lead, suddenly weightless. Then an image of the enormous dam, dark in its dank surroundings, flashed inside her mind, and with it came the feeling that it held back an ocean of potential. She felt the cold brass in her mind, the shape and the pressure, and she pushed.

  Nothing happened.
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br />   She released her grip. Maybe it’s gone, she thought. She was surprised to find that this was quite a melancholic reality to be faced with. Realising she was holding her breath, she exhaled and gulped in the cold air deeply. She was about to reach for the knob to open the door physically when a steel voice rose inside her.

  Try again.

  Her hand froze, inches from the door. It was a deep adult voice, and its authority shocked her. In that moment, with the snow falling around her and the orange light on her face, she briefly wondered why this suddenly seemed so important. The answer came back clearly: because it’s a weapon. You can use it as a weapon if you have to, and if things keep going the way they are, you’re going to need a weapon soon. She realised the truth of this immediately. She had never considered it to be a weapon before that moment.

  She braced herself and grasped the handle with those invisible hands in her mind, determined this time. She pushed hard and felt the doorknob creak under the pressure as it began to turn. She smiled. It turned further, and then the door swung open. She stood there in the snow, enjoying the moment of elation this brought her. It lasted only moments, though, as her mother appeared from the darkness at the end of the hallway. Her smile faltered.

  “Are you sure you should be doing that?” her mother asked, her voice cracking slightly.

  “Doing what?” In her mother’s eyes, she could see the warning clearly: They’ll come and take you.

  “Just be careful, Jane,” her mother said softly. Then she turned and walked back to the kitchen.

  Nora would be leaving for work soon. Jane knew the night shifts exhausted her. She used to paint, but her paintings and supplies were now stored in the attic. She was immensely talented, though Jane had not seen her paint in years. She remembered the beautiful oil paints of giant blood-red roses in bloom, petunias and lilies that would be scattered around the house, but that was years ago. Apparently she was too tired now. Jane ignored the empty glasses with traces of red wine that she had been finding around the house more frequently after her mother’s shifts ended. She would wash them in the sink and say nothing.

  As she entered her room, Jane took off her uniform and changed into her casual clothes. She would be finished with school soon. Probably sooner than you think. This stray thought flittered through her mind, and she paid it no further attention. She lay on her bed and thought about how she had opened the door. It hadn’t been that hard. She just had to push harder than she remembered doing when she was younger. At least she knew it was still there; that was what had been important to her in that moment. She had blocked it out for so long, she was terrified in that split second that she had eradicated it completely. Of course, that was probably impossible, for better or worse.

  Why would I be so afraid of such a thing? she wondered. The answer came to her slowly but clearly; there was danger approaching. She didn’t know how she knew this, or in what form it would come, but it now became clear and distinct in her mind.

  She knew also that the impression she had about the power had been correct. It was a weapon, and something was building, like a pot boiling slowly, or colliding tectonic plates ready to shift position and cause destruction. When that happened—with whatever chaos it brought to her doorstep—a weapon was probably the exact thing she would need.