“Alters?”
“Dissociative Identity Disorder is sometimes called Multiple Personality Disorder. Some trauma, injury or pathology causes the patient to seek refuge in different identities. Alternate identities or alters. One of his alters used the name John Astor.”
“What happened to this patient?”
“He’s not your man, if that’s what you mean,” said Macbeth. “I’m afraid he died. Suicide. One I lost.”
“I see.” Bundy thought for a moment, holding Macbeth with his striking eyes. “Have you heard of a group of people who call themselves the Simulists?”
Macbeth frowned. “No I haven’t. Why do you ask?”
“But you have heard of Blind Faith?”
“Yes …” Macbeth sighed, making no effort to conceal his impatience. He looked out at a glass-darkened Boston. “I’ve heard of Blind Faith.”
“And, of course, you knew Melissa Collins?”
Macbeth turned from the window. “Melissa? What about Melissa?”
For a moment Bundy seemed to be assessing Macbeth; his reactions. “Don’t you know?”
“Know what? What the hell is this all about?”
“I’m sorry, Dr Macbeth, I thought you would know by now. The mass suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge. Melissa Collins was the leader of the group. She was the CEO of the company they all worked for.”
Macbeth stared at Bundy. He had heard about the suicides, had known they were young people, but being in Copenhagen he had never read the details, names. Melissa? Melissa had been one of them? While his brain processed what Bundy had told him, he noticed a dark stain camouflaged by the diagonal stripes on the FBI man’s tie. Melissa was dead and all Macbeth could think about was what the genetic reason could be for Bundy’s unusual eye color and where he had gotten the stain on his tie.
“Melissa …” Macbeth heard himself saying again. Bringing himself back, he shook his head vigorously. “I don’t believe it. Not Melissa … there is no one I know less likely to commit suicide than her. And I’m talking as a professional psychiatrist as well as someone who was involved with her. Whatever happened, I know she didn’t throw herself off the Golden Gate.”
“I’m afraid there is no doubt about it. No doubt at all. Not only did she jump, she seemed to lead the others to as well. It was witnessed by a police officer and recorded on security cameras. You never suspected her as being potentially suicidal?”
“No, of course not. Melissa was the most well-balanced person I know, and the very last person to take their own life.” Macbeth thought about what he had just said and how it echoed almost exactly what Casey had said about Gabriel Rees.
“When was the last time you saw Melissa?”
“About three years ago. Before I went over to Denmark. We … well, we went our separate ways. She took up a research post in Los Angeles. I had no idea she had moved to San Francisco or had set up a software company, so when I heard about the Golden Gate thing, I simply didn’t put it together.” Macbeth shook his head. “I just can’t believe it.”
“And at that time, the last time you saw her, was she involved with any particular group?”
“What kind of group?” Macbeth found himself blaming Bundy for his own confusion. None of what he was hearing made sense. He was also confused by his own lack of grief, but he knew that would come. Eventually. The world reached John Macbeth in arrears, through the delaying relays of his weird internal wiring.
“I mean, did she have any particularly strong religious affiliations, or involvement with belief groups? Particularly fringe belief groups.”
“Melissa involved in a cult? That’s crazy. She had no time for religion, mainstream, fringe or otherwise. As far as I’m aware, she was an atheist. No … If that’s the story behind what happened to her, I don’t believe it.”
They were on the other side of the Common now, Boston still flat and smoked-glass dark.
“We have evidence that she was involved with a group that meets many of the criteria of a cult,” said Bundy. When he spoke, the FBI man seemed empty of expression or emotion. Maybe a lack of affect was trained into you at Quantico.
“What? You think Melissa was involved with Blind Faith?”
“No, not Blind Faith. Did she ever mention John Astor to you?”
“Astor? No, not that I can remember. I don’t think either of us had heard about him at that time. It’s only over the last few months—”
“Did she ever mention either Samuel Tennant or Jeff Killberg?”
Macbeth thought for a moment then shook his head. “Who are they?”
“One of the people Melissa was working with in San Francisco was called Deborah Canning. Canning is also from Boston – do you know if Melissa knew her before she moved to California?”
“If she did, she never mentioned her to me. Now, could you tell me why you’re so interested in Melissa if it’s a case of simple suicide?”
“Twenty-seven young people throwing themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge at the same time could never be described as simple suicide,” said Bundy. “The California Highway Patrol are still investigating the event. My interest lies in the circumstances behind it.”
“So why do I get more than a whiff of the Homeland Act?”
“There are a number of toxic cults out there at the moment; some are potential threats to national security. I’m simply looking into any possible connection between what happened in San Francisco and certain persons or groups of interest. To be honest, there’s probably none, but we have to go through the motions.”
Macbeth nodded, even though Bundy did not strike him as a through-the-motions type.
“Ah, we’re here …” Bundy said with a smile that made no effort to reach his strange eyes. Macbeth could see they were outside Casey’s apartment building. “We’ll wait for you while you drop your stuff off, then take you to the Schilder Institute. It’s the least we can do for taking up your time.”
“You didn’t take up my time and you saved me the fare. But I’ll take a cab to the Institute. I’ve got a few things to do here first.”
“If you’re sure, Dr Macbeth. In the meantime, thanks for your time and help.”
*
After he got out and the silent driver placed his bags at his feet, Macbeth watched the town car glide down the street and around the corner. As he did so, he reflected on the fact that he now stood exactly outside his brother’s apartment, even though he hadn’t told either Bundy or his driver where Casey lived.
26
KAREN. BOSTON
It was two weeks and one psych visit after the incident in the street.
Karen still performed her doorway rituals; still led a perfectly normal life outside those abstract moments of ceremony. Dr Corbin expressed no concern about what had happened in the street, explaining that her OCD made her no more prone to delusions or hallucinations than any one else; what she had seen was either a real girl who had simply stepped back onto the sidewalk and out of sight, or it had been a simple case of pareidolia, where the brain adds a visual two-and-two to make five. We all do it, he said.
Nevertheless, the episode troubled her. She had lain in bed recalling the imagined little girl and the real man who pulled Karen to safety – trying to work out where she had seen him before and how she had known what his voice would sound like before she heard it.
And she wasn’t alone: others had seen things that weren’t there. The whole city had been shaken by an earthquake that hadn’t happened. How could she be sure she hadn’t experienced a hallucination? Or that she wouldn’t have another? But her OCD rituals remained her priority: they had to stop.
Dr Corbin had suggested she take time off to do an intensive period of ‘deprogramming’, as he called it. He could refer her to a New York clinic that specialized in deconstructing OCD rituals, taking them apart step by step, while also carrying out deep phobia therapies. Karen had resisted, explaining she couldn’t just drop everything for some kind of nut-job detox. There
was the Halverson meeting coming up. Maybe then – maybe after the Halverson meeting.
Karen’s employers were tolerant, if not entirely supportive, when it came to her OCD. And anyway, it didn’t make that much of an impact on her work: her firm was housed in a modern, clean-lined building with light decor and most of the offices were open-plan. Karen’s own office had wide double doors kept perpetually open. The ritual for leaving or entering her office through such a large portal was simpler and less obvious than the usual: she bowed low, as if passing through a tunnel, keeping as far away from the corners as possible, finishing with a flourish of web-busting hands as she straightened up. She also made an effort to be first in the office each morning and carried in her handbag an extendible duster, which she would run over the jambs and corners of the doorway.
But the Halverson meeting was not taking place in her firm’s offices.
The Halverson Building was an ornate mid-nineteenth-century edifice of Portland stone; all history-inundated nooks and crannies on the outside, marble and oak on the inside. As Karen, her boss Jack Court and her two corporate liability co-workers made their way through the foyer, having first patiently waited for Karen to complete her entrance ritual, she eyed the ceiling cornicing, the angles, details and edges of the paneling, the marble statuary mounted on plinths, the corners where the walls met.
A fact is not a dead thing. A fact is alive and can grow; wields huge power. A fact that lived constantly in Karen’s head was that the world crawled and seethed and teemed with insects. There were more types of insect – nine or ten million species – than the rest of Nature combined. Ninety per cent of all life, other than bacteria and single-celled organisms, was insect. It was they who ruled the planet. And this old building with its countless hiding places was a haven for them. They were there, in the shadowed places and unseen spaces, waiting.
“Are you okay?” she heard Jack Court ask her. “I need you to be okay, Karen.”
She nodded. Then again, more firmly. She was not going to let this win. She was not going to have people ridicule or pity her any more. And she was not – definitely not – going to let it screw up this account.
*
The Halverson group of companies was a world-spanning empire: behind five hundred household brands, behind the logistics organizations that brought a thousand more to markets around the globe, and – rumor had it – behind the election of half a dozen senators and, at least in part, the current President. The reason Drew Halverson had not stood for Presidential office himself, it was said without much irony, was because it would mean a diminishment of his power and influence.
That Halverson was personally heading the meeting signified its importance. After a decade of rapid growth and merger, there was governmental concern that the Halverson Group was beginning to hold too much sway over the nation’s economic destiny, compounded by public unease over Drew Halverson’s close relationship with President Yates, whose strong religious beliefs he shared. There were even rumors of prayer sessions in the White House.
In addition to the four members of Karen’s team, there was a guy from the DOJ’s Anti-Trust Department and a woman from the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC woman was small, dumpy and not making a good job of being middle-aged and eyed Karen with the intense animosity that the homely reserve for the comely. The Feds were there by invitation – part of Halverson’s very public commitment to total transparency – and it was up to Karen and her team to convince them that the proposed schedules of expansion, which included making Halverson the biggest national exporter to the soon-to-be-federalized European Union, did not violate Anti-Trust legislation.
She had spent a great deal of time preparing for this presentation and, as Jack Court introduced her, Karen felt calm, composed, ready. Whatever else was going on in her life, Karen was a consummate professional.
She took her place at the podium and started her presentation. In much the same way that she felt detached during her OCD episodes, whenever she was making a presentation she felt separated from herself. She saw herself, heard herself. And she was good. Really good. Five minutes in, she caught Jack Court’s expression and knew that he was thinking the same.
She had it nailed. Every possible infraction was revealed as well within the FTC’s rules and the Department of Justice’s guidelines. Even the frump nodded approvingly as each box was ticked, each corner shown uncut. All the time Drew Halverson sat at the head of the conference table and smiled an approbatory smile.
Halfway through she felt it: the same sensation she had on the street immediately before she had seen the little girl. Like déjà vu.
Focus.
She pressed on with the presentation, but the feeling of unreality, of repetition, of otherness intensified. She stumbled over a couple of lines, causing Jack to frown and Halverson’s smile to fade.
The air changed. It became not just different, but alien; like no air she had experienced before. Heavy, dense, moist and rich, clinging to her skin like a warm, damp vestment and oiling her mouth, her nostrils, her lungs.
The sunlight through the window dimmed. Everything was becoming vague. Inconsistent.
Karen gripped the sides of the lectern, the only thing that seemed solid, real to her.
Focus. Concentrate. Work through it.
Something fell onto the angled lectern. A tight black disc, about the size of a dime, that must have come from the ceiling. It had a shiny, ridged appearance, a coil of geometric pattern. She jumped back and brushed it off the lectern with the back of her hand. Karen looked up but could not see where it had come from. She started the last section again, not looking up to see her audience’s reactions. Three more black discs fell onto the lectern, two bouncing straight off, the third rolling down her notes before being caught on the page rest at the bottom.
“What the hell …” Karen began, this time looking up at the others who now stared at her the same way people stared at her in shop doorways. The fat bitch from the FTC was smiling malevolently. But it was as if they were all looking at her from behind thick, rippling glass, or a screen of viscous film.
Karen’s confusion was gone in an instant. The terror that now filled her left no room for anything else. As she watched, the black disc twitched, then uncurled. A pelmet fringe of hair-like black legs rippled nauseatingly from the flanks of the four-inch-long, three-quarter-inch-wide millipede, and Karen heard the scuttling rattle of a thousand sharp feet on the paper of her notes. Something shrill and penetrating filled the room and Karen realized she was screaming. The room, her audience, the building around her were now just layers of glassy, rippling outlines.
There was a sound above her. Karen looked up and barely noticed that the roof of the building had gone and daylight filtered through the fronds of impossibly tall ferns, her attention focused on the granular cloud that tumbled towards her. Hundreds, thousands of curled-up millipedes fell on her: into her hair, onto her clothes, into her screaming mouth. The podium, the floor, everything turned black with them as they uncurled and scuttled across every surface, over each other’s bodies. Over Karen. She spat them from her mouth, tore them from her hair, stamped on them in a demented frenzy. She looked to the others for help, but they were gone. The Halverson Building with its wood paneling, marble floors and Portland stone was no longer there. Not even as a glassy outline.
I am mad, she thought through her panic. I have gone insane.
She had been in a room. The room had had a building around it; there had been a city around the building. But the conference room was gone, the Halverson Building was gone, Boston was gone.
She was surrounded by a forest.
The millipedes had stopped falling but still she clawed frenetically at her hair, face, body. She felt her whole body itch. God oh God oh God … She realized they were inside her blouse. They were crawling up her legs. She tore her navy jacket off, ripped at the silk of her blouse. She was covered with them. They scurried over her, each one a ripple of pin feet on her
skin. Urgent hands beat, clawed and swept them from her. Feet stamped at a seething black carpet of them.
Karen ran, stumbling over roots and tubers, getting up and running on … anything to get away from the churning, writhing mass of millipedes, still furiously brushing them from her body as she ran. The ground was mulchy, moist, and her high heels had been sucked from her feet after only a few strides. She ran and ran but there seemed to be no end to the forest.
There was no sense to this. What had happened to her? What had happened to the world? Think, Karen, she told herself. Use your brain. Make sense of this. She stopped running and checked she was clear of the crawling bugs. With a shudder she scrubbed the last of them from her skin.
Something else made no sense: Karen, insensitive to anything except her terror, had lost track of how long she had been running, but she knew it had been a while and over difficult terrain. So why wasn’t she out of breath? Her breathing was heavy, but not labored, as if she had trotted up a flight of stairs rather than run for her life through a tangle of subtropical forest.
The forest. The inexplicable forest.
It was dense and dark, but unlike any other she had ever seen. Everything around her was impossibly tall but, for the most part, they weren’t trees. Impossibly tall ferns – huge, branchless trunks topped with fronds – soared above her, crisscrossing each other to create a green cathedral of vaulted ceilings. There was no grass beneath her feet, or anywhere to be seen, just a dense, sodden carpet of moss and lichen. Even these seemed supersized: thicker and bigger. And the air: the cloying, rich, thick air.
Standing there, Karen sought desperately to make sense of what was happening. This forest that wasn’t a forest, this air that wasn’t air, this world that wasn’t her world.
Insane.
Maybe that was the explanation: she was mad. Whatever Dr Corbin had said to reassure her, Karen knew she had had psychological problems. Was the insanity surrounding her really just insanity within her? Was this all some kind of elaborate delusion or hallucination?
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