Sabriel leaned back in his chair. He had the horrible feeling that, even under normal circumstances, Gustav Mealie would probably try to dispose of him in some way once they were alone in space. In just under eleven hours, Mealie would change into something unpleasant that nobody could give the exact characteristics of. Sabriel would be alone, on a flimsy mote in a vastness beyond comprehension with a lunatic whose rage would at best be murderous. Already he could hear frenzied howls echoing down gleaming corridors, his own footsteps running ahead of them. Could the doors be locked on a robotic space-cruiser? What if Mealie damaged the ship in some way...?
Tortured by such thoughts, Sabriel allowed himself to be led into the street. He could not run.
Mealie had him firmly by the arm. ‘Sabriel, don’t look so damned scared!’ he hissed in Sabriel’s ear. ‘We’re partners, right. You don’t have to be scared of me.’ Mealie squeezed his arm encouragingly. ‘Believe me, kid. God, I’d have missed you anyway. Let’s just forget all that happened, OK?’
Sabriel could not speak. Ahead of them, he could see the high, wired gates of the spaceport. I’m dead, he thought. I’m dead.
‘One thing you need to learn is how to be strong,’ said Gustav Mealie with a smile.
The College Spirit
Julianne Farr did not want to be paranormal. She wanted to be a competent secretary and, perhaps later, somebody’s wife. Her ambitions were small, on a cosmic scale.
Her powers had simmered quietly away inside her until she reached puberty, when they had rudely come to a boil. Only a strong instinct for self-preservation and a good deal of common sense had prevented an early public exposure of her condition. It had begun with a tingling in the fingers, nothing more, which she attributed to having gone to the library without her gloves; it had been an especially chilly day. Later, she had become aware of an unpleasant metallic taste in her mouth, and her toes had gone numb, so her mother had wisely bundled her off to bed and consequently turned out the bathroom cabinet in search of cold remedies.
Lying beneath the duvet, in a ginger murk of orange-flowered curtains drawn against the drab afternoon, Julianne listened, with mounting unease, to the inner rhythm of her juices. She now regretted having gone round to a friend’s house the previous evening to watch a horror film. It had been a particularly lurid movie, which had portrayed, in gleeful detail, the possession of a teenage girl by devils. Julianne was normally far too sensible a creature to believe anything like that could happen in real life, but couldn’t help wondering, given the puissant pressure of the sensations she was experiencing, whether the sub-aural groaning in her fibres presaged the imminence of something supernaturally nasty.
She had a fever; her mother dosed her with remedies. That night, tossing and turning in a bed too hot for comfort, she directed her rage at the enveloping quilt. When it then flew off the bed and landed, in a clatter of deodorant and cleansing cream bottles, on the dressing table, she assumed she’d physically thrown it. That was the first manifestation of her Talent, but she did not recognise it as such.
Steven Rider quite liked the idea of being paranormal. His Talent had emerged in the crib, as it were, although from the crib might be a more accurate description. Luckily, or unluckily depending on viewpoint, his mother attributed the first vision she received in the baby’s room to the product of an unhappy combination of two tranquilliser pills and a furtive slug from the vodka bottle she kept hidden among the cereal packets in the pantry. It cured the woman’s tendency for drug abuse, although, as further manifestations presented themselves, she had to revise their cause.
Baby Steven had Dream Fingers. He could waggle his fat little fists and fill the room with illusions of whatever took his fancy. During the weaning period, some of these illusions were quite alarming. Nannies came and went from the Rider house with the frequency of trainees on government training programmes. Steven’s father came and went, usurped by the miracle child in his wife’s affections. Some people thought Steven was bewitched.
Mother eventually took matters into her own hands, dismissed the hired help and, steeling herself to the unsavoury task, administered corporal punishment whenever Steven became ectoplasmic. By the time nursery school became due, the boy had been imprinted with several mother-fixated behaviour patterns for good. He had also learned the survival lesson of concealing his Talent from others. For quite a long time, he thought he had a lot to thank his mother for.
Leslie Carter simply accepted without argument that she was paranormal, being a prime specimen of the Archetypal Victim persona. Her tendency to shrink from more assertive children, developed gradually into the ability to fade – with romantic grace, if only anyone had noticed – into a mere wisp of a phantom.
She discovered her Talent while witnessing a particularly aggressive classroom brawl. As other children shrieked and goaded the opponents into greater depredations upon each other, Leslie, overcome by nausea and a desire to flee the horrid sight of bloody noses, poured herself away through the floor. Nobody noticed. Finding herself in the school basement, she sat for a moment or two, quite disorientated. Always an imaginative child, and possessed of a parentally-repressed visionary personality, she calmly experimented amid the gruntings of the school boiler with her newfound Talent.
Leslie knew from the moment of its manifestation that her Talent made her very different. She, like Steven and Julianne, also managed to hide it exceptionally well. Its secret was a strength that sustained her through many a childhood humiliation. In private, she was a ghost and had visited the deepest caves of the earth. In public, she was a non-entity and, as such people generally are, was often on the receiving end of cruel taunts. She had no friends, but saw things of immense wonder that compensated for that lack.
Julianne’s power grew from modest beginnings. She could not remember when she actually became aware of it as a distinctly unusual part of herself, but knew that the absolute confirmation of her Talent had been the time when Zoe Bradley flounced past her in the art room at school, aglow with the smugness of having recently claimed Julianne’s boyfriend for herself. Blind with humiliation and, she regretted to admit, jealousy, Julianne had quite unconsciously directed the beam of her thoughts at a precarious bronze sculpture – the pride of the art teacher, though lacking in aesthetic merit of any sort. Everyone had been astounded at the way the thing flew through the air like a burnt-out, crash-landing satellite. Julianne had known, with no doubt whatsoever, that she had been responsible for its flight, although, luckily, nobody else had the wit to realise it. She had not been proud of that victory. It had been the voiceless and anguished cry of a female deeply hurt. She had not meant to hit an artery.
Julianne Farr could move objects, seemingly any object, by the power of her will alone. For a while, she had nurtured this secret power, considering herself possessed of an innately female talent. Her mother had a bookcase full of distinctly suspect New Age literature, which seemed to confirm Julianne’s beliefs. She knew she must not divulge her secret to anyone. Then, the Department of Paranormal Resources had gone public, and it had been brought to society’s awareness that a sub-species of humanity lurked within their midst – the paranormals, people possessed of unusual powers.
For a long time, Julianne deluded herself that she was not one of these people. She was not a freak. Later, as womanhood led a developing insight into her life, she realised the truth. Then, the Talent she had loved, and which had given her secret pleasure, became a thing to deny, to purge from her being. No more making cups of tea from the other side of the room so that her viewing of the portable kitchen TV didn’t have to be interrupted. No more putting her feet up while her mother was out and directing the Hoover and duster to clean the house themselves. No more watering the hanging baskets without having to balance on the rickety stool. If she wanted to be normal, she must hang on to it fiercely. If she denied the power, then it could not exist. It was still useful when cutting her toenails in the privacy of her room, however.
Steven Rider and Leslie Carter were also faced with this dilemma when they realised they were not, as they had believed themselves to be, unique, but part of something rather more common. Paranormals were not as abundant as the media liked to make out, of course, and neither Steven nor Leslie ever came across someone else who had a Talent. Steven’s mother actually discussed it with her son at the time the news broke.
‘It was the tranquillisers,’ she said. ‘When I was carrying you. It must have affected you, in some way. You are definitely not one of those people.’
Steven knew she was wrong, but did not contradict her.
All paranormals were expected to make themselves known to the DPR, and were, in fact, required by law to register their Talent. Steven’s mother would not allow him to do any such thing and, as he himself considered there had to be sinister implications in registering himself anywhere, was happy to abide by her decree. He and his mother spent many a happy hour as he entertained her with the delights he could spin from his fingers.
Sometimes, he was forced to use his Talent to protect himself from assailants; his fey delicacy had inflamed many a bully’s attack circuit. One night, after school, he had systematically driven a fat bully insane, and had watched the dismantling of his enemy’s mind with the cool detachment of a scientist. He had the ability to discern exactly what would scare a person witless, and could provide an illusion to fulfil their worst nightmares with ease.
Leslie, of course, had no aggressive slant to her Talent. Privacy was important to her, which was the only reason why she never presented herself to the DPR. Everyone knew that paranormals were expected to work for the government. Leslie knew her nerves would never be able to cope with that. Anything that smelled even faintly official sent her into a dumb trance of fear, and the thought she might be forced to use her Talent for something dangerous like spying was intolerable. The sight of blood had her in a dead faint even before the first drop hit the ground, and spies had to shoot people, didn’t they? Leslie considered that paranormals could not provide any service other than those connected with espionage. She imagined that most Talents would be very similar to her own.
Her other secret was a shameless adoration of an American paranormal named Kid Spectrum. Americans, naturally, were not discreet in any way concerning paranormality, and to most people’s eyes, the States were infested with posturing super-heroes who had little regard for decorum and absolutely no good taste in dress. Leslie, however, had been entranced by the scrubbed, youthful exuberance of Kid Spectrum when he’d been interviewed on TV during an exchange visit. In her dreams, she evanesced into his affections like a winsome film star. It was a worship quite at odds with the rest of her personality, although devoutly pure.
As Julianne’s life progressed and school was left behind, she prided herself on her self-discipline. She enjoyed her course at the local secretarial college and, because computer keyboards required so little physical effort to use, she had no real use for her Talent there, anyway. It shamed her that the occasional lapse was almost always generated by negative feelings towards her fellow students. She was careful, but it was noted by her peers that those who fell foul of Julianne often suffered accidents and mishaps of one form or another. She endured terrible guilt about this and went out of her way to make it up to the injured parties. Her friends joked that she must have an exceedingly efficient guardian angel, or something. Or something. In every other respect, Julianne Farr was an unsurpassably typical girl and this, more than all her precautions, probably preserved her secret.
Steven’s mother told him he was artistic and packed him off to art college as soon as he left school. Steven would rather have become a psychiatrist, or something similar, as he was very interested in conditions such as schizophrenia, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. He managed to amuse himself through college by spinning the odd illusion at the expense of various tutors he especially disliked or other students whom he felt deserved shaking up a little.
Once, after he was supposed to have produced an analytical drawing of a chrysanthemum and hadn’t, he conjured the illusion of a beautiful piece of work, which he presented to his tutor, only to snatch it back, fake an artistic frenzy, weep, tear it up and cry, ‘It’s not good enough! Not good enough!’
The tutor concerned, a woman who strained for empathy with her students, comforted him for an hour and then awarded him a high mark for his work. It was a shame he couldn’t use that trick more than once.
Romantically, he tortured women, for he was an exquisitely attractive creature. Even after he discovered, with no surprise given his upbringing, that his romantic interests lay in a decidedly alternative direction, he did not abandon his adoring females. He needed them for developing his Talent. It took practice to create the illusion of a phone ringing from considerable distance away.
After leaving college, he coolly abandoned his mother (who had since descended into such an alcoholic oblivion his departure registered only slightly in her consciousness) and moved to a new town. The brilliance of his portfolio – he only had to implement his Talent a small amount in this respect – secured him a position with the first design company he applied to. Thereafter, he applied himself to devastating any female hearts he found himself sitting near to and seducing happily married men. His job was attended to, with deft panache, in his spare time.
Leslie Carter graduated from shunned child to wall-flower till girl, drooping behind one of many conveyor belts and electronic pricing scanners in a cavernous hypermarket. She was a pale little waif, not ugly by any standard, but deliberately plain. Her mouth turned down at the corners and was too thin. In the staff-room, she drank her tea from a special mug she’d brought from home and became quite agitated if her refreshment break rituals were ever disrupted by newcomers insensitive to her requirements. She was affably tolerated by other members of the staff and, to some degree, protected. Leslie was a person who brought out the maternal instinct in full, although people with the best intentions usually tired of trying to help her live what they considered to be a normal life, after all their efforts to improve her appearance and social graces were ignored.
Leslie never, under any circumstances, used her Talent in the presence of others. She was not an unhappy person, for she had her own flat, with plenty of small rooms so she could drift between the walls to her heart’s content, and was fulfilled by simple pleasures such as an orderly walk on Sundays and a supply of good books.
If ever anyone at work was crass enough to mention boyfriends to her, she never even blushed or simpered, but said, with firmness, ‘None of that for me. I like my life the way it is, with just me in it.’ It was the simple truth. She never craved company. Every night, before she drifted off to sleep, she spent a pleasant half hour conducting an imaginary affair with Kid Spectrum. This consummated her romantic inclinations to capacity, even though they had still not got beyond the meaningful glances stage of their relationship.
Julianne never really developed any relationships with men either, although she did sometimes wonder whether using her powers somehow drained her in that respect. Well, there’d be plenty of time for that later. She had decided that the age twenty-six would be a good time to get married. If difficulties presented themselves when the time came, maybe she could use her ability to nudge events along in her favour. Saving someone’s life, for example, might well sway their affections, and it would be no problem organising a convenient accident. After that, she promised herself she would stop using the power for good, devote herself to a fulfilling relationship, and raise children. She would not even use it to help her with the housework. She would not use it at all. Well, not unless her husband was unfaithful, or something.
Steven Rider’s powers were unmasked when he was only twenty-one. He killed a man, but only by accident. How was he to know the illusion of a slavering Doberman would drive the fool into the path of a speeding car? Stupid. Steven had no regrets about this – the man had been an unfaithful lover, after all –
but was furious with himself that the shock of seeing the accident caused him first to evaporate the dog in front of over a dozen onlookers and then quite visibly to spray out a selection of quasi-illusions as a reflex action. He had been bundled into a police car even before the ambulance arrived.
Knowing he had been discovered evoked a dark god from Steven’s soul. His police cell resembled the seventh circle of hell by the time the man from the DPR arrived to interview him.
‘I think you need some help,’ said the man.
Steven merely sneered in response, in a distinctly Mephistophelean way.
‘You can’t frighten me,’ said the man, unperturbed. ‘Maybe you should put away the horns and fangs now.’
‘You can’t kill me,’ Steven said, restored to angelic beauty.
The man sighed. ‘My dear boy, I have no desire to. You are far more useful to us alive. My name is Mr Sharpe. Now, if you would be so kind as to answer a few questions...’
Leslie Carter presented herself to a local DPR office when she was twenty-five. She quite surprised herself in doing so. One night, she’d been sitting in her flat, drinking a mug of cocoa, her cat on her knee, while watching the late news on TV. Bad news followed bad news. The world was in such a mess: killings here, deceptions there, depredations to the fair planet everywhere. She had turned off the TV and sat in deep thought for several hours.
Like everyone else, she always felt so powerless in the face of global destruction and yet, perhaps she was mistaken to feel that way. For too long, she had hidden herself from the world, concealed her unique Talent. Perhaps she had been put here for a purpose. Perhaps she could actually do something. Leslie, what’s come over you, girl? she said to herself, although her heart had begun to flutter with the enormity of her decision. She knew that she was going to offer herself to the world. She was going to stand up and be counted; tomorrow, she was going to make herself known to the DPR!
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