The Ethereal Vision

by Liam Donnelly

CHAPTER 3 — CRASH

  Psychokinesis: “alteration of the state of an object by mental influence alone, without any physical intervention.”

  September, 2018

  On a warm September evening at about seven o’clock, with the sun still in the sky, Nora wrapped a full-length cardigan around her and enjoyed a cup of coffee on the porch outside their cabin before preparing to leave. Jane was saying her goodbyes to her friends on the field in the distance in front of her. Watching Jane while sipping the coffee slowly, Nora imagined for a moment that everything was completely normal. She was still young at 34, and so was Tom. He was a great guy—stable—and she loved him. Jane was a good kid—kind and intelligent.

  They had enjoyed a beautiful, rare, sunlit summer together, spending most of the time in the cabin. It was only half a kilometre to a beautiful beach where the blue water met the sand and stretched on into forever in a thin, shimmery line. They had gone there almost every day. Jane had swam in the sea with her friends. They had sleepovers, and Nora had sipped glasses of red wine with others in the park, sometimes even under the stars. After one a.m., the lights in the park were turned off. Being so far from the city, the park had no ambient light at all. Above them, if they stayed up, was an ocean of white stars. Nora could even parse the arm of the Milky Way, which arched over them in the centre of the sky.

  On rare occasions, she would wait until Tom and Jane had gone to bed, then slip outside with her coat wrapped around herself. She would lie on a lawn chair and look up at them. She allowed herself to think of other worlds and other people, other places and other times. She had done this a lot when she was young; she had a wild imagination. But in growing up it had become part of her past. She relished these moments. It was just her, the sky, the stars and maybe something else besides her.

  There was another side to that summer, though, that Nora did not want to think about. It was the dog.

  The damn dog.

  She sipped her tea and tried to push the memory away, but she could not. The dog’s snarling face—caught in the vice-like grip of her daughter’s mind—surfaced now like an ancient trauma, as though the snarling animal were right in front of her.

  “Oh God.” The words slipped out of her in a breathless gasp, and her hand covered her mouth reflexively. The sun was in her eyes, and she could still smell the beautiful, cut green grass of summer, but she was also back behind the door of the cabin, in that memory, seeing for the first time what her daughter was capable of.

  The earliest reports and videos had begun to surface only in the previous eighteen months, and Nora and Tom had marvelled at it along with everyone else. After that morning, though, Nora had gone to the internet with much more intent to find answers. She had watched her daughter keenly when the first signs of what they referred to as psionic potential had shown itself.

  A hairbrush had slid across the table one morning. Jane had reached for syrup in a press just a little out of her reach, and it had fallen towards her and hit the floor, breaking into a gooey mess. The girl had no idea what had happened, but by that point, Nora had gathered enough information to know.

  For just a moment more, she bathed in the glare of the light beams of the remaining sun. She closed her eyes and listened. She could hear Jane in the distance. The trees in front of the old grey castle that lined the backdrop of the park rustled softly in the gentle breeze. She inhaled the cool air and the beautiful smell of grass as the tail end of summer washed over her. Each cell in her body experienced an ephemeral moment of bliss. Then she opened her eyes again and called her daughter. They would be leaving soon. It would be the last summer they would spend together.

  The car was packed, and they were driving two hours later. Jane was almost asleep in the backseat, and a peace had fallen over Nora and Tom. He placed his hand over hers as he drove.

  “Did you think about the application again?” he asked her.

  For some time, Nora had been thinking about returning to school to study fine art. Tom made enough money as a computer programmer to support them, and she knew a friend who could get her shift work if necessary. It was a job she knew she would probably loathe, but she thought she would do it if things came to that.

  “Actually, I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I’m afraid.” She was afraid. She was afraid of returning to college just like most normal people would be after such an absence, but there were other fears lurking in the shadows. Things like glasses of chocolate milk sliding across dinner tables and children’s toys seeming to come to life and move by themselves. There was the sense of something building in her life. The voice inside her that said, no, not yet, I have to wait, was not just the voice of fear, she knew. That was too simplistic. It was also this thing her daughter possessed, coupled with what had begun to spread on the news and on the internet: videos of people doing extraordinary things, some so extreme they frightened her. Then there was Tom.

  Being honest with herself, she realised he presented just as much a problem as anything else. He seemed to be pretending that none of it was happening—that their daughter possessed no unusual faculties and that the videos that had emerged simply did not exist. Given the extent of just how untrue all of that was, it presented another serious difficulty to her. He seemed to want desperately to retreat from this new, emerging world of the psychic.

  There were other videos now, posted in the time since the first ones appeared and catching some of these people in even more desperate acts of destruction. In one such recording, a young man in a supermarket somewhere in North America had caused a fight. He had then proceeded to levitate the supermarket shelves off the floor in anger. They had flown into each other in an explosive fashion. Nora would watch these videos once and then never again; they were too devastating for her.

  The sun was dipping below the horizon, and an orange glow came over them in the car. It had stopped raining and the clouds had cleared only ten minutes before. The dark, slick country road stretched before them in a curving, ponderous way. Nora lay back and closed her eyes. The window was open an inch and a cool breeze blew her hair.

  “Maybe I will call the college tomorrow. Maybe it’s not too late for this year,” she said, suspecting that she was lying, both to herself and to Tom. Overly courageous she was not—introspective, she was.

  “Good for you,” she heard him reply.

  She fell asleep then with the realisation that she did want to go back. She was good, but over the years her painting had suffered. There were still a few pieces of her work scattered throughout the house. She had sold quite a few of them as well. Whenever that happened, she, Tom and Jane would celebrate with a meal at a nice restaurant and a toy for Jane. This usually took the form of a sophisticated digital device that Nora knew nothing about, from a world she didn’t take much part in.

  She drifted off thinking about this—how alive painting made her feel and that she was good. She didn’t need anyone to qualify that for her. In a half-dream state, streaks of red danced in front of her; the blood-red hues of the roses she had once loved to paint came to life in swirling swaths of dangerous colour.

  She woke up shortly afterward as the car swerved violently to the right. Tom had misjudged a turn on the dark roads, and the tires had lost their grip; the car was out of his control. He pulled the wheel far to the left, but overcorrected. Her body jerked to the right, and a single groan escaped her lips as her temple hit the passenger window. Nora’s eyes seized on the spinning road in front of her, and she gripped the handle. She screamed as adrenaline flooded her body, but there was no real time to comprehend the grim reality they were facing; they were going straight out over the embankment into the darkness of a valley below.

  She stopped breathing entirely as the car went over the edge with Tom still trying, pointlessly, to wrestle control of the wheel. She could think only of Jane, who spoke to her from the back in a small, weak voice. It was as though she were speaking from another world.<
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  “Mom, I’m slipping…” was all Nora heard as they flew through the brambles lining the unmarked road and sailed into the ocean of air ahead.

  Nora would later ponder what her daughter had meant by that phrase and would come to an understanding: the surface, conscious person whom Nora knew as her daughter was slipping and giving way to the atavistic, protective force somewhere inside her.

  Then, with the darkness of nothing sailing past her window, Nora turned her head to look at her daughter’s face one last time. She felt it. It was the same rippling energy that had come from Jane when she caught the savage dog, only this time it was ten times more powerful. She felt a tsunami of force wash over her as the energy exploded outward from her Jane’s mind.

  The window next to her smashed outward, sending glass shimmering down into the valley. She heard the chassis buckle around them under the pressure and watched in mute, breathless awe as some of the glass rose from the smashed window and into the front section of the vehicle, only to hover there like some strange, glinting ornaments. The sound of the windshield as it buckled and splintered into a hundred fragments resounded throughout the vehicle, though it remained intact.

  The car was dipping forward towards the darkness below when it began to slow. Then it froze in mid-air, suspended in the grip of Jane’s mind. Nora screamed as both she and Tom slammed against their safety belts. She was dazed and thought, Probably have whiplash. She did.

  She looked over the countryside that stretched below them like a gaping mouth, inviting them to their deaths. She pushed back against her safety belt and turned dramatically, ignoring the spike of pain that went up her neck and seemed to go across her skull and into her forehead.

  She looked at Jane, and then a new wave of fear swept over her. Jane, pressed against her safety belt, appeared to have fallen into some kind of catatonic state; her pupils were dilated, and her breathing was desperate and rapid. Nora knew immediately that the conscious Jane—her daughter—was gone and what was there was only the protective force from where this power came. She lost all concern for her own safety then.

  There was another problem, though, that now echoed in her mind. What if Jane didn’t have the strength to pull the car back up? No human—especially a child—was ever meant to channel energy like this. Nora didn’t need anybody else to confirm this for her; it came in a tremendous, instinctive knowing. An image formed in her mind of an elastic band stretching and snapping.

  She was about to reach behind her when Tom began to move. She looked over at him as he lifted his left leg and placed it on the forward dashboard. She watched in horror as he unhooked his seat belt and turned to reach for Jane. Then the car lurched again, worse this time. Nora’s body jerked like a puppet and the world faded around her as she lost consciousness.