The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

  “We are not like that.”

  “We shall see, Friar.”

  • • •

  On the eleventh day of the march, the second day after the Franciscans had encountered the welcoming party, Sakmo’s party felt confident that they would soon reach their destination. All were in good spirits, no longer anticipating misfortune. When at last they saw the outline of their houses carved into the rock and, behind that, the barely visible cleft leading into the Canyon of the Serpents, their hearts were overjoyed.

  Something, however, caught the friars by surprise.

  Directly before them and awaiting their arrival stood some five hundred or more people. A great number of them were young women accompanied by their children, standing together at the entrance to the village. In front of the crowd were two elderly women carrying a large cross made out of wood and hemp, and wreathed with flowers. The cross, as tall as a pine tree, was tilting back and forth in their arms. It reminded the Franciscans of a procession during Holy Week.

  Sakmo left his position at the head of the travelers and, walking back to the Franciscans, said to them quietly, “They must be Owaqtl women, from the Falling Stones clan. Some of them have seen the Lady in Blue near their village.”

  Friar Juan looked at him doubtfully, but the Indian, ignoring his look, went on speaking.

  “Ever since the Woman of the Desert came to us, many women have spoken with her. And even though they are not allowed to ingest the sacred mushrooms that enable one to speak with the spirits, they talk to her easily.”

  “The women? Who do you mean?”

  “Look closely, Friar. Can you see the two women who are carrying the cross?”

  “Of course.”

  “When they encountered the Woman of the Desert for the first time, they called her Saquasohuh, which means Kachina of the Blue Star. Later, when they began to anticipate her arrivals beforehand, they believed that she was a Corn Mother, a spirit. Now nobody is exactly sure what they think.”

  “You mean they know when she’s about to appear?”

  “Yes. It is one of women’s gifts to see into the future. You are unaware of this?” Sakmo paused, and then added, “If they are here, it is because the woman has sent them. Let’s wait and see.”

  When the two guides from the Falling Stones clan saw the two white men dressed exactly as the Lady in Blue had described, they broke out in enthusiasm. They lifted the cross above their shoulders and approached the friars. And then, before the astonished eyes of the Franciscans, they crossed themselves. One of the old women asked Friar Diego to show them “the book.”

  “The book?”

  “The Bible, Brother!” Friar Salas said excitedly.

  “But Friar Juan . . .”

  “Do it! Give it to her!”

  The Indian took the Bible in her hands, kissed it softly, and then shouted something incomprehensible, which increased the fervor of the women around her.

  The old woman’s long white hair was tied in two braids. She never wavered. Holding the Bible between her arms, she passed among the crowd, letting the people touch the book. There were sick people who kissed the dark leather covers of the Scriptures as if they expected to be cured by it. Others even threw themselves to the ground, begging the book to bless them. Still others merely let the tips of their fingers brush the surface of its pages.

  “This is no doubt the work of God.”

  The friars stood there, amazed.

  “No one will believe us when we tell them!”

  “They will, Brother. These people’s faith will make us strong.”

  FORTY

  ROME

  Il dottore Alberto was satisfied with Giuseppe Baldi’s explanations. The Benedictine had absolutely no idea who Father Corso’s mysterious visitor could be. And as they both knew, there would be no easy way to find her. Corso had also taught at a high school and frequently received visits from students of both sexes. If none of the female students wore red shoes or formal dress such as the doorman described to the police, the description might just as well fit one of the women who worked at the school. Or one of his coworkers from Vatican Radio.

  “Listen closely, Albert. Before he died, Father Corso wrote to me, bringing me up to date on the project. He said you had synthesized the sound frequencies that would enable a person to observe the past. Is that true?”

  “It is.” He nodded. “All of our results were erased from his hard drive. Although I have to tell you that we achieved something grander than observing the past.”

  “What are you referring to?”

  “You’ll see, Father. Chronovision’s principal objective was to capture images and sounds from the past. The Vatican simply proposed that we take a glance at history. We, on the other hand, discovered that we could intervene in it. And to pass from being mere spectators to actors changed the project into something much more important than anyone had imagined.”

  The Third Evangelist glared at Albert Ferrell incredulously.

  “Intervening in it? Are you saying that you can manipulate history at will? To rewrite it?”

  “Something like that. Father Corso was very conscious of what that could mean, and in the last weeks of his life he became taciturn, and even cold.”

  “Give me a fuller explanation, please.”

  “Look at it this way: our method of projecting the human mind into the past by means of certain harmonic vibrations allowed us, in principal, to pry into other epochs. But that was it. It was like watching a movie. The ‘traveler’ was unable to touch anyone, pick up the salt shaker, or play an instrument. He was a species of ghost who looked briefly into the past. And that was all.”

  “Harmonic vibrations!” Baldi blurted out. “That was my theory.”

  Albert Ferrell scratched his goatee and smiled.

  “It was indeed. But we improved it. Are you familiar with Robert Monroe’s research?”

  “Vaguely. Cardinal Zsidiv told me about him.”

  “Perhaps you know that this recording engineer developed a kind of acoustics that, if correctly applied, permitted what is called ‘astral projection.’ ”

  “Yes, I understood that. . . . The Church knows nothing of ‘astral bodies.’ Those are vulgar terms, from the New Age. Fuzzy.”

  “Technically, you’re right,” Ferrell conceded. “But it’s important that we avoid letting ourselves be blinded by terminology. Although Monroe spoke of ‘astral bodies,’ Catholics also use a term to refer to the existence of that invisible element that resides in every human being: the soul. Or do you not believe in its existence?”

  “A far better word,” Baldi said just above a whisper. “It is not, in my opinion, the soul that appears in two places at—”

  “All well and good, Father. I’m not trying to discuss theology with you. It all depends on what sort of soul we’re talking about.” Corso’s helper threw his arms up into the air. “I studied this subject before I came here. Recall that Saint Thomas Aquinas allowed for the existence of three kinds of souls, with three distinct functions: the sensitive; that which gives movement or life to things; and that which creates intelligence.”

  This time Baldi made no attempt to reply. He simply questioned Ferrell with his eyes. The man made him nauseous, and yet at the same time he was surprised that here was someone trained by the military who used Thomist concepts to justify his activities. Ferrell guessed at what he was thinking.

  “And why not, Father?” His tone was insulting. “Even Tertullian believed in the corporality of the soul, which is, in the final analysis, the same idea that Monroe proposed.”

  “Corporality of the soul? The soul weighs nothing at all; it has no shape, no smell. It is not a physical object!”

  “Saint Thomas was very concerned with the sensitive soul, which is the one that connects us to the material world, and which is, at the same time, the one easiest to ‘awaken’ with sound. I myself would not be so certain that this species of soul could not go so far as to take physical s
hape. In fact, Father Corso told me that you, with your investigations into sacred music, and Monroe, with his sonic frequencies in the laboratory, were trying to achieve similar ends. Only that Monroe was further along than you, Father, because he had managed to achieve ‘soul separation’ at will.”

  Albert Ferrell turned his back to Baldi as he walked over to the window to lower the venetian blinds. He then turned on the lights in the studio. The priest, from the other side of the room, changed the conversation.

  “You said this room was constructed in the image of another, in the United States. Is that right?”

  “Yes. The dream chamber at Fort Meade.”

  “Why would they build something like that on a military base?”

  “Ah, Father, I did not take you to be so naive. Over the course of the cold war we learned that the Russians, in addition to developing conventional and nuclear weapons, were in the process of opening a new battlefield, one of the mind. They trained their best men, so that in a state of ‘astral separation’ they would be able to spy on secret North American military installations or locate the positions of Allied missile silos in Europe—without leaving Siberia.”

  “And you call me naive? Your country believed that and took countermeasures.”

  “True enough.” Ferrell appreciated Father Baldi’s ironic tone. “Our mission was, first of all, to protect our country from offensives of this type, and immediately afterward to investigate the phenomenon with the help of Monroe’s techniques. A number of our agents attended his courses, perfected his methods, and went on to build the first dream chamber in 1972. I was a mere sergeant back then, far from having any real ideas about what kind of ‘weapon’ they were designing inside that room. By the time I entered Fort Meade, I knew that Monroe had achieved a twenty-five percent success rate with his astral ‘takeoffs.’ Those of us in the military working on the project had the same level of success thanks to a tough psychological training program. Which is why we recruited people with the most developed sensory abilities in the country.”

  Baldi stared at Ferrell. He was somewhere between incredulous and stupefied. This man, openly a charlatan, really believed what he was saying. It was a shame that his patriotic sentiments, as revealed by his military dress, had turned out to be so ridiculous.

  “And how did you use the room, your ‘dream chamber’?”

  “The same way Father Corso and I used the one here. Obviously, this model is much more developed than the one from 1972,” he said, gesturing to the anatomical table that dominated the room. “It allows us to obtain more information with each experiment. But the standard procedure is essentially the same.”

  “Standard procedure? I had no idea one existed.”

  “Of course it does.” Albert Ferrell cut Baldi off before he could continue. “First we choose a ‘sensitive,’ a ‘dreamer,’ and then we bombard him with sound on a gradually increasing scale. That is how we attempt to induce the mental state conducive to his ‘soul’ detaching from the body and flying freely wherever he wishes.”

  “And you call them ‘dreamers’?”

  “The idea came from one of our last sensitives. She told us that her family gave her that name. We liked it.”

  Baldi disregarded Ferrell’s remark.

  “Could you give me a better explanation of the sounds you use?” The priest sat down in front of one of the IBMs and started to take notes in a black moleskin agenda book he took from his robes. Albert Ferrell’s eyes remained fixed on him.

  “Well, it’s relatively simple. Monroe believed that the different frequencies of sound he synthesized were something like the essence of every one of our habitual states of consciousness: from the normal waking state to lucid dreaming, to stress and even mystic ecstasy. He was convinced that if he managed to synthesize these ‘essences’ and deliver them to a subject through headphones, his or her brain would harmonize with the frequency and, eventually, submerge the patient in the mental state desired. Can you imagine the possibilities of something like that? He could achieve any kind of change in mood or in attitude simply by making us listen to a particular sound vibration!”

  “And he pulled it off? He managed to synthesize the sounds?”

  “Definitely! For that alone they should give him a Nobel Prize,” Ferrell said as he leaned toward Baldi with a flyer he had pulled out of a nearby box. “He called each of these acoustic ‘samples’ or essences a Focus and assigned them each a number that indicated the level of intensity with which they affected the human brain.”

  “An ascending scale.”

  “Exactly. A scale,” Ferrell repeated. “For example, while employing what he called Focus 10, he discovered that he could access a curious state of relaxation, one in which the subject’s mind was completely awake while the body slept. That essence was a sort of whistling sound, designed to achieve the first synchronization of the two cerebral hemispheres and to prepare the subject to receive more intense frequencies. The synchronization in question is achieved over the course of three to five minutes, and is generally accompanied by strange yet ultimately inoffensive bodily sensations. Phenomena like partial paralysis, itching, or uncontrollable trembling.”

  “Do all the sessions in the dream chamber start like that?”

  “Pretty much. Little by little, the patient passes to Focus 12, which tends to stimulate states of expanded consciousness. The person achieves ‘remote vision’ of objects, places, or persons; their ability to control that was, in the beginning, the thing that most interested us, as it could be applied to military espionage.”

  “And they did so?”

  “With relative success. But the best part was when we discovered the utility of other, more powerful Focuses.”

  “There were others?”

  “Indeed, Father. Monroe also synthesized Focus 15 sounds, which gave their subjects the experience of being in a ‘state outside of time’; they designed a tool that allowed them to open their subjects to information originating so deep in the subconscious that they appeared to be from another class of superior intelligence.”

  Albert Ferrell tried to gauge his visitor’s reaction.

  “Have you ever heard of ‘channeling’?”

  “Of course.” The priest grimaced. “Yet another product of the New Age movement. Pseudomystical garbage. I am surprised you would give credit to such notions.”

  “In reality, Father, the channeling experiences are the modern version of the mystics’ dialogues with God or the Virgin, or of the voices that Saint Joan of Arc is said to have heard. In antiquity they attributed these voices to the angels. The reality is that frequencies of the Focus 15 type, involuntarily camouflaged in spiritual chants, could have stimulated these kinds of states in the past. Which is why I took an interest in Chronovision and its research.”

  “And, naturally, I should suppose that there are further Focuses . . .”

  “Naturally, Father. Now comes the interesting part.”

  Ferrell took a seat across from Father Baldi, as if what he was going to say required the priest to give it his utmost attention.

  “Of all the Focuses discovered by Monroe in his experiments, those that interested us, as well as Father Corso, were those Monroe designated 21 and 27. The first facilitated astral separation and the second allowed the subject to utilize those psychic ‘doublings’ at will. Even so, he intuited that there existed a higher Focus, which he called X, which could materialize a doubled soul in the place it was traveling to, creating something almost supernatural: a person could be physically in two places at once.”

  “He wanted to provoke a bilocation artificially?”

  Baldi stopped taking notes and backed his question with an icy look.

  “Well, neither Monroe nor we had this ‘essential sound.’ But Corso wanted to simulate it in another way. In the Vatican Archives he discovered the file on a seventeenth-century woman who, it seems, managed to project herself across thousands of miles. And Corso hit upon the idea of sending o
ne of our ‘dreamers’ to that exact date in order to ‘steal’ the sound.”

  “And what date was that?”

  “Sixteen twenty-nine. In New Mexico. And do you know why?”

  “The Lady in Blue!” A stroke of lightning flashed in Baldi’s mind.

  “Very good, Father!” said a pleased Ferrell with a smile. “I see that Cardinal Zsidiv has informed you well.”

  FORTY-ONE

  LOS ANGELES

  As insane as it sounds, he exists! Your troublesome little friar exists, Jennifer!”

  Linda Meyers was excited. Jennifer had never seen her like this. In her hand she held notes written in an almost indecipherable handwriting, and triumph was written across her face. Jennifer had rushed over to her therapist’s office for a session at noon after receiving her phone call. The psychiatrist had discovered something important, but had roundly refused to say anything over the phone.

  “Let me explain,” Dr. Meyers said. She took a deep breath and invited her patient to take a seat. “This morning, early, I had the occasion to practice a bit of Spanish.”

  “Practice Spanish?” It sounded absurd.

  “I was mulling over your dreams. Over how incredibly detailed they are, and the quantity of precise dates they contain. I took the liberty of making a few calls to Spain to see if anyone there could shed light on the subject you’ve been telling me about.”

  Jennifer remained silent. Her psychiatrist was checking to see if her dreams had a historical basis?

  “First I telephoned the Royal Academy of History, and they gave me the number of the U.S. embassy in Madrid. My Spanish classes were paying off at last!”

  “And what did they tell you?”

  “Well, the people at the embassy didn’t know much, but they recommended that I call the National Library. And when I told the library that I was calling on behalf of the embassy, they were very accommodating and gave me the director’s private line.”