Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  The phone rang, and Sara answered it. She listened for a few moments, then put her hand over the receiver and gave it to Mark. She looked pale.

  “What is it?”

  “They’re gone,” she said. “Eddie’s left the hospital, and Maryellen’s disappeared from her home. They say they found a lot of those Disneyland pamphlets in both rooms. The wicked stepmother would like to speak with you.”

  When Mark hung up the phone he shuffled to the closet.

  “I wish she’d learn to call me before she calls the police,” Mark grumbled. He struggled for balance with one leg in his pants.

  “So,” Sara said, “they’re off to Fantasyland, after all.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mark said, “and neither does the furious Mrs. Thompkins. It’s too pat, too soon. It’s what they wanted us to think.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “I’m a little angry, yeah,” he said. He pulled his t-shirt on backwards and had to reverse it. “It’s a holiday, I’d rather spend it with you than tracking down the kids.”

  “That’s not it.”

  Sara slipped her arms around him from behind and kissed his neck.

  “You’re mad because he lied to you. You’re mad because you trusted him, you were starting to believe him, and now that he’s lied to you you don’t know what to think.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Mark turned in her arms and hugged her.

  “How do you know all that stuff?”

  “I live with a shrink,” she said, “genius rubs off. But I know Eddie pretty well, too. Kids open up for writing teachers, it’s like being a cross between the confessional and Switzerland—neutral ground, and all that. He idolizes you, and so does Maryellen. Eddie must have a good reason for this; he knows what Mel Thompkins can do. He must think it’s important, very important.”

  “Life or death,” Mark said. “Because that’s what he’s up against if Mel finds him before the cops do.”

  “Then Thompkins is out looking?”

  “Absolutely. And she says he took his rifle.”

  Sara muttered something under her breath and let Mark finish getting dressed. She sat in her flannel nightie at the dilapidated desk next to her dressing-table and tapped a forefinger against her pursed lips.

  “So where are you going, Lone Ranger?” she asked. “Not chasing a madman with a rifle, I hope.”

  “I’ll be chasing a madman, all right,” Mark said, “but not that one. You’ve seen what the kids wrote about the Jaguar?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s the bad guy who’s destroying the fabric between our universe and another, right? The one who never has a face in Maryellen’s drawings?”

  “That’s right,” Mark said. “And Eddie’s been convinced that he’s on this side, nearby, and that he’s in trouble. Dammit! I’ve spent all this time looking for the symbology behind all this. . . .”

  “What else is there?”

  Mark looked her in the eyes but couldn’t bring himself to answer.

  “You think it’s true?” she asked. “How could it possibly be true?”

  “I’m thinking backwards, now,” Mark said. He sat on the edge of the bed and took her hands. “I’m just going to throw out a bunch of ‘what-ifs’ and you stop me if my logic goes bad.”

  “Ok, masked man. Shoot.”

  “First of all, assume they’re right. A Jaguar persona somewhere near here crosses to the other side and causes mayhem with the butterfly kiss in brains and genetics and what all. Eddie says he must be like them, so he must go through terrible pain when he wakes up. His influence on the other side is nearly constant, so he must be asleep or hurting most of the time. Where can he get the physical care he needs under those circumstances?”

  “A hospital?”

  “Right. A hospital, maybe some kind of full-time home care if he’s wealthy. He probably doesn’t like life here all that much, he’d prefer to stay in the dreamworld all the time. Eddie said something else recently that bothers me.”

  “This whole thing bothers me. Do you realize how far-out this sounds?” She toyed with a basket of empty film canisters.

  “Of course,” Mark said, and laughed. “It’s my job to realize how far-out this sounds, and my job to make the patient comfortable enough to keep talking. I’ve been going at this all wrong, and now I’m trying to remember everything . . . ten years of everything.”

  “So what else did Eddie say that bothers you?”

  “He said two things. One, that once inside somebody’s brain you can actually alter their brain, their chemistry, their self. Like editing a film, you just have to know how to erase, restructure the jigsaw to form another picture—but until the person wakes up, you don’t know what you get.

  “The scary thing is that I believe this is what he’s acting on. He said once that he thought the Jaguar was afraid of dying, and that he was looking for a way to live forever.”

  “Live forever!” Sara laughed. “Well, good luck. Ponce de Leon drank a lot of water and look what it got him. . . .”

  Mark shook his head.

  “I know, I know. But Eddie thinks it’s possible to . . . stay in a brain, take it over.”

  “You mean, like, use a body until it wears out, then pick out another one?”

  “Exactly. He thinks the Jaguar is looking for an ideal body on the other side, biding his time until he finds something perfect.”

  “Why wait? Why not just use any old body that you’ve got access to, then move into body beautiful when you find it?”

  “The big question is, what if you move in and you can’t get out? If you only get one shot, you want it to be a good one. And once he’s safe on the other side, he can start playing with our world the way he’s been fooling with theirs.”

  “All right, Holmes,” Sara said, “those are the ‘what-ifs.’ What do they mean?”

  “I think that Eddie and Maryellen are teaming up to make a move on the Jaguar, to flush him out or lure him in.”

  “Well, what do they do when they have this Jaguar by the tail?”

  “They’d have to kill him, don’t you think?” he asked. “Or get inside his brain and change him. He’s got more experience than they do, I think that would be much more risky. If he turned the tables. . . .”

  “Mark, I’m a writer. Willing suspension of disbelief is my stock in trade. But that’s on the page and this is reality.”

  Sara pulled his hands to her lips and kissed his knuckles, absent-mindedly. She wasn’t through thinking it over yet, he could tell, so he waited her out.

  After a few moments she asked, “You really want me to pretend this is real and give you an opinion, is that it?”

  “Yep. That’s it.”

  “Well, I don’t think either of the kids is murderer material, but you’d know more about that than I do. Do you think they’re out driving around to all the hospitals in the area?”

  “No,” Mark smiled, “I don’t. And I think if they’d known where to go, they’d have rushed into it without all this subterfuge. That’s why I think they’re going the mind route, and why it’s important for me to find the Jaguar before they do.”

  “Oh, Mark.” The look Sara gave him was purest pity. “What are you going to do, now? Visit all the hospitals, nursing homes and rent-a-nurse offices in the state? Region? Nation?”

  “No,” he said. “I think I know exactly where to go.”

  “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “The Soldiers’ Home.”

  “Good thing you weren’t in the military,” she murmured. “They’d lock you up there for sure.”

  “I’m serious,” he said. “If all the what-ifs are true, then I have one shred of tangible link between Eddie and the Soldiers’ Home.”

  Her sadness-and-pity look was gone, and her eyes sparkled with their old fire.

  “That paper . . . that patient you were so mad about when we first met . . . !”

  “Exactly!” he said. “And I forgot about it because it wa
s easier to forget than to fight. Easier than believing that another world is being dragged through disaster because of some power-hungry vegetable on a psych ward. . . .”

  “Politicians who appear powerful don’t try to prove it nearly as much as the ones who don’t look it,” Sara said. “If this person exists, he’s probably power-tripping in this other universe because he’s relatively powerless in this one. Right?”

  “Agreed,” Mark said. Then he shrugged. “Maybe simpler than that. He could be playing a game in his head, unaware that it has real consequences in a real place.”

  “A mind game? That’s your department, no?”

  “Yeah,” he chuckled. “The buck always seems to stop here.”

  Sara cranked some raw film into one of her canisters and snipped it off neatly, then loaded another. A stray shaft of sunlight escaped the clouds and illuminated her sure, slender hands.

  “Maryellen has really taken to photography,” she said. “I like seeing her in school. She’s an excellent student, when she’s there. Sometimes I wish I were a real teacher, full-time, instead of these special one-month consultant jobs.”

  “You’d miss the travel, and you know it,” he said. “You’d hear about a coup in Costa Brava that you’d missed and you’d pout for a week. . . .”

  “Stop it,” she said, and tilted her nose in mock arrogance. “I do not pout. I think, I consider, I mull things over, but I do not pout.”

  “But my point about your travel?”

  “Ok, touché. But working with kids every once in a while sure brings me down to earth.”

  Mark rubbed his eyes.

  “I feel like I’m floundering in the basics,” he said. “I have two patients hallucinating like mad, and I’m getting caught up in their hallucinations myself. . . .”

  “Have you started dreaming their world, yet?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “But my dreams have been very strange lately, and there’s a shadow around them. They’ve talked about this, it’s a feeling . . . like being watched.”

  Sara clipped off her last canister of film, tossed it into the basket on her desk with the others. She put her arm around him and kissed him.

  “Tell me your dreams, you handsome devil. The doctor is in and everything is confidential. . . .”

  “It’s where this dream business leads that gets me,” he said.

  Mark knew now that he was more troubled than he’d let himself believe.

  Thank god for Sara, he thought. She always brings the best out in me.

  “Suppose it’s true, what they say. The fabric between these two . . . universes . . . is a skin. Which is inside and which is out? Which is self and which is other? They claim they pass through this skin and back. They claim that ‘out there’ or ‘the other side’ is inside some other skin. The skin itself was the dream zone, where they pick up the scent and nose into some poor dreamer’s skull.

  “Going through the skin takes energy. Being out on the other side physically is . . . annihilation. It’s particle-antiparticle stuff; everything goes poof in a burst of light. Dreams ride a shock wave. The return through the skin to this side is the waking phase. Hence the pain, the danger.”

  Mark took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “If they’re right,” he said, “we’re in danger ourselves, and from two directions. If some tyrant on the other side figures out how to manipulate this side like the Jaguar manipulates that side . . . not pretty. Then there’s this side. If what they say is true about getting information—imagine what the CIA or the KGB would do to get their hands on someone who could just tap into dreams, follow them to their source, mosey around in some president’s skull for awhile and shop for facts. . . .”

  “It gives the phrase, ‘I’ll sleep on it,’ a whole different meaning,” she said.

  Sara’s hand caressed his cheek.

  “What’s up, doc?” she asked. “Lost in space?”

  He didn’t answer, because a thought from the back of his mind took form, and suddenly sprung to the fore with full force of fang and claw.

  “What is it?” she asked. “You’re so pale . . . you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I just scared myself,” Mark said. “Think about this. Think what it means if we’re right . . . about that patient in the Soldiers’ Home.”

  “Well,” she offered, “it means that the government is interested in him, and is interested in keeping other people from being interested in him.”

  “Yes,” he said, and suppressed a shudder. “And wouldn’t that also mean that they’d be very interested in two local children who exhibit the same symptoms?”

  “Easier than believing there’s another world.”

  “Right,” he smiled again, and kissed her. “That, too.”

  “So,” she said, “you’ve never come out and taken sides. What do you think about this other world business, these jaguar priests?”

  “I believe the kids are on to something,” he said. “I don’t know . . . What if the Jaguar figured out how to harness those priests, like batteries in a series, or an electrical coil? What if he did that and blew a hole in the skin, and we’re the weak point in God’s skull? What if the kids beat him to it . . . ?”

  Mark hugged Sara again, and whispered, “Sometimes, as a doctor, it’s more expedient to assume that a suspected condition exists and treat it, rather than waste time getting tests back. ‘To err on the side of life’ is the medical term. That’s what I’m doing here. We have everything at stake, everything. Covering all bases is mandatory when everything’s at stake—that’s the first thing I learned in medical school.”

  “And what was the second thing?”

  “Marry an accountant.”

  Mark used the ten-mile drive to the Soldiers’ Home to put together an argument that wouldn’t alienate Colonel Hightower. It didn’t work.

  The Colonel, as usual, was unrelenting and Mark White checked the boiling point on his anger. He had always believed that anger didn’t get anybody anywhere, but he was just beginning to see how, at times, it felt too good to pass up. The Colonel was still in charge, and he was fond of reminding Mark of that fact.

  “Listen, White, I haven’t seen you in years and to tell you the truth, I don’t miss you a goddam bit. I know what you’re after. That kid is your ticket to the big time if you write his script and he learns it. This is all choreography, media stuff, and I’m not going to perpetuate it from this office. Besides, it’s a holiday, goddammit!”

  “But Colonel. . . .”

  “And communicating through dreams! That’s National Enquirer stuff, not American Journal of Psychiatry. You’re manipulating some artifact on a tracing and taking advantage of some troubled boy to make yourself a career and I think it stinks. . . .”

  Mark slapped the desktop.

  “I can prove it,” he said, hoping he could. He unclenched his teeth enough to keep his voice level. “Give me a shot at this guy, you can set up the double-blinds and we’ll have scientific evidence. . . .”

  “I promise you I’ll have your job if you don’t cease and desist right now. Is that clear? This patient is a security concern, you are not authorized. . . .”

  “I’m asking for authorization. . . .”

  “There won’t be any. Not for you, not for anybody. Any more on this matter and I’ll have your license. You know I can make good on this.”

  “Ok, Colonel, ok. Let me describe your patient to you. If the description fits, you don’t have to violate your security. But you’ll know I’m right. If so, I can tell you what to do about it and the rest is up to you. I don’t have to know.”

  “You really are crazy, White. Jesus!”

  “Your man—or woman—has long periods of unconsciousness. When he wakes up, he’s very, very ill. Whatever you’ve been getting from him in the past he hasn’t been delivering lately. At least, not to you. How’m I doing?”

  “You’ve been reading too much science fiction, White. Now get out—”


  “You’re going to lose him, Colonel,” Mark said. “If I’m right, then one way or another you’re going to lose him. What if he finds out a way to do for somebody else what he’s been doing for you?”

  “There’s no way he could spring out of here short of an assault on the whole . . . goddammit, White, you’re pissing me off! Now get the hell out!”

  “Your language is getting nasty, Colonel. What are you afraid of?” Mark asked. “Who’s got the kind of clout that can stop you cold?”

  “You don’t,” the Colonel said, and stood behind his desk. He pushed his leather-covered chair away from his desk, making room for fight or flight. “Now get out.”

  Got you cornered, Mark thought. He pressed harder.

  “This is CIA stuff, isn’t it? You’ve got some loony in here mucking around with peoples’ brains, doesn’t that concern you?”

  Then, before the Colonel could muster another outburst, Mark took himself up on a subconscious dare.

  “You want my patient, too, don’t you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  The Colonel was calmer now, shifty-eyed, pale as a shoplifter caught with watches in his shorts.

  “You don’t care what happens to your boy, do you?” Mark challenged. “He’s not good to you if you can’t control him. You know you’ve got my kid in the bag. You can sit back and see how this comes out, and either way you win. Rounding up new blood, is that it?”

  “You have no patients here, Dr. White,” the Colonel announced, calmly, “and you are clearly a disturbed individual. What you are committing right now is criminal trespass. Shall I bring in the escorts?”

  How much did they know? How much did I give away?

  Suddenly, Mark White had a lot more to worry about.

  . . . in Chichen Itza

  and in the north coast kingdoms . . .

  let them prepare for the days

  of stones and blood.

  —Destruction of the Jaguar, translated by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno

  Maryellen snapped awake. A faint splash-splash splash-splash of tires through mud holes froze her breath in her throat.

  “It’s dad,” she whispered. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.