Welcome to Witchlandia

by Steven Popkes

  I was tired, aching in every bone. It had been weeks since I’d had a workout like that. I was out of shape.

  I had won the z-sprint by luck and deceit rather than by skill. If the course had been forty feet longer Sniezek would have pulled enough ahead to beat me.

  Okay, I told myself. No more drinking. Back to the gym and the high-protein shakes. Wouldn’t hurt to increase my run a mile or so. Yeah. The way I’ve been acting for the last couple of months? Time to start running again.

  Eli’s place was an old captain’s house. I came across the ferry terminals and over the Peabody-Essex Museum, up Essex Street, landed gently on the widow’s walk and collapsed on the bench, breathing heavily.

  Eli had built a trellis around the widow’s walk for privacy—Eli was no stranger to flyers. Or to me.

  Of course, the fact that Eli had been David’s therapist from the time he was six until he was discharged at twelve gave him a certain familiarity.

  How long had it been since I’d been here? Since David had left? Had it been that long? Surely I had come up here to visit at least once since then. I couldn’t remember. The wind and the sweat made me shiver. I remembered meeting David up here one night when we first moved to Boston. The trellis had given us some privacy. We took advantage of it. I wondered if Eli knew how we’d abused his hospitality.

  I stood up and found the key hidden in the planter, opened the door and took my stick inside.

  Once out of the wind I quit shivering. I checked my watch. Dooley wouldn’t be here for at least an hour. If Eli was here, he’d be in his office with a patient. That room was so soundproofed Armageddon could happen outside and they’d only find out when they finished. I had a brief image: “I think we’ve made great progress but it’s time we wound down. Why don’t we pick up next—oh my God!” I found myself grinning.

  I went down to the basement and undressed, threw my clothes into the dryer so they’d at least be comfortable to wear even if they smelled. Then, into the shower and blessed hot water.

  Half an hour later I was in the kitchen wearing clothes only slightly damp and somewhat salt-encrusted and eating a slice of homemade bread.

  “Here I was worried you wouldn’t make yourself at home.”

  I looked up and Eli was watching me. Without thinking, I stood up and hugged him—or as much as I could, given that he was round as a basketball.

  Eli hugged me back and kissed me on the cheek. Then, he held me at arm’s length and considered me critically.

  “Not sleeping well enough. Nor have you been eating well. Or exercising.” He cocked his head. “And drinking too much.” He sighed. “Well, at least I can feed you.”

  Eli pushed me towards the table and sliced some more bread and put it in the toaster. Then, he pulled out mozzarella cheese, some tomatoes, a bit of basil and garlic and some olive oil. Ten minutes later, he had a bowl of bruschetta. He handed it to me.

  “Eat. I’ll make espresso.”

  For a moment it was as if every cell in my body had been waiting its entire microscopic life for that bruschetta. I licked the spoon, scraped the bowl with the bread.

  Eli had sat down across the table and watched me. He gave me the tiny espresso cup. “How have you been?”

  I shrugged. “So-so. Working on a case that might involve paranormals. That’s why Dooley is coming over.”

  Eli checked his watch. “We have half an hour. You are unhappy. Why?”

  “Sean and I broke up. He left.”

  “Did he leave? Or did you push him away like you did David?”

  “That’s not fair!”

  Eli shrugged and didn’t say anything, waiting for me to answer.

  I composed myself, sipped my espresso. “I suppose I pushed him away. That’s what he thinks, anyway.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.” I leaned back in the chair. “It’s been two years since David and I broke up. For whatever reason. That’s over. Sean was different. But I still couldn’t make it work. I can’t make anything work out here. Things have been crappy since I moved out here. I’ve been here three years. Three years of crap.”

  “Boston is a hard place to live.”

  “I don’t have any friends. Back in Columbia, I had Arnold, Anita, Mattie, Carl. Sandy never let me have a boyfriend she liked, but she was pleasant enough. Out here...” I raised my hand and let it fall.

  “Do you have police friends?”

  I shook my head. “Sean was a friend until we started sleeping together. Now that’s over. Dooley is a colleague. The other cops don’t want to have much to do with me.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “I had a workout with Sniezek this afternoon. He said I didn’t take the job seriously enough.”

  “Do you?”

  I shrugged again. “Not really. I mean, it’s a good flying opportunity. I’ve learned more about flying since I came here than I ever thought about before. But the cop stuff?” I thought for a minute. “If I could keep the flying but do something different, I’d do it.”

  “The thrill of the job is gone.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Eli studded the wall behind me for a moment. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. After all, he’d said it before.

  “I could get you a job over at the Natick research labs, you know. Or even at MIT.”

  “As a lab rat.”

  He nodded. “Can’t argue with that. Or the need for human experimentation. But though most of the flyers have donated time at one point or another—you included—we’re coming to a point where we need someone permanent on staff. You could be that person.”

  I thought about it. This wasn’t the first time Eli had hinted at something like this, but it was the first time he’d made such a bald offer. I had to take it seriously, even though it deeply disturbed me.

  “No. Not yet, at least.” I shivered.

  Eli caught it and smiled wanly. “You think about it.” He rubbed his hands together. “Back to the subject at hand. You know this whole thing is familiar, don’t you?”

  I grinned at him sheepishly. “You mean like David was with the piano when I met him?”

  “Exactly.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think they’re the same thing. David had lost his belief in his talent. That it was something more than just hammering keys. All he had to do was realize he reached people. Even I could see that. Me: I’m a good flyer. But it’s not art or anything.” I looked over at him. “What do you think?”

  Eli stood up and stretched. “I think you and your insurance card should come over to the hospital and see me a couple of times a week.”

  “Can I afford you?”

  “We have a sliding scale for civil servants.” He stroked his beard for a moment. “Seriously, though. You sound very unhappy. There’s no reason for someone as bright, young and talented as yourself to be that unhappy. I think I could help. It doesn’t have to be official therapy. Just come on by and spend some time with an old friend.” He smiled craftily. “Did I mention I put a pool table in the basement?”

  “No!”

  “I did! Blond wood with a charcoal gray felt. Flat as a promise. Come on over. Drink my beer. Play pool with me. We’ll talk about things.”

  “You’re a wicked man, Eli.”

  “I admit it.” Then, his expression suddenly turned professional. “And Officer Dooley has just arrived.”

  oOo

  Eli took us into his office. He gestured towards two chairs facing his desk and sat across the desk from us.

  It was a large desk, glass-smooth and made of a deeply grained wood so dark it looked almost purple, empty but for a tasteful black monitor to Eli’s left. The desk put a distance between us that forced formality. Dooley and I on one side; Eli on the other. We were police officers. Eli was a material source of information.

  It made me uncomfortable. I’d always been welcome in this house. So welcome, I’d come in today unannounced and, without a second thought, taken
a shower and eaten a meal knowing Eli was enthusiastic about me being there.

  I suddenly realized Eli had brought us into his office on purpose. The enforced formality was intentional.

  I looked around the room. Eli had furnished it sparsely. Two chairs. A sofa on one side. Some framed diplomas on the wall and a pair of ancient Japanese prints. I knew without investigation they were original and expensive—Eli would have nothing less. Cabinets of the same elegant wood as the desk lined one wall, a similarly made bookshelf lined the other. Two tall and narrow windows on opposite walls and a great bay window behind Eli’s desk, framing him as he looked at us. The office was on the top floor and the house was on a slight rise. Through the window, if I looked past Eli and over the neighboring houses, I could see the bay.

  “What can I do for you, Officers?”

  Dooley spoke up. “We’ve been checking into two murders that seem to be related.” He pulled out his notebook. “One of the victims was a paranormal—”

  “Oscar Plante.”

  Dooley sighed. “There’s a natural give and take to these things, Dr. Boor. If you wait and let me ask the questions at my own pace, it will go faster.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Since one of the victims was a paranormal, we are obligated by federal regulation to make sure the crime wasn’t paranormal-related. We had some questions about the paranormal testing process.”

  Eli looked surprised. “Really? Katelin’s been through it. There’s not much more to know.”

  I spoke up. “I can get the scores of the secondary test and the final training exams. We’re interested in the primary screening.”

  Eli looked at us blankly. “Whatever for?”

  Dooley consulted his notes. “We’re interested in high-scoring people who had no predisposition for selection.”

  Eli leaned forward. “Why?”

  Dooley watched Eli without moving for an uncomfortably long time. Then, he shrugged. “It’s likely a lead that will go nowhere. Federal regulation indicates we have to look at all possibilities.”

  Eli nodded. “All right.”

  “Do you have access to the pre-test scores?”

  Eli nodded again. “Of course. Part of McLean’s contract is to update the primary test regularly to prevent gaming.”

  I was surprised. “People try to game the test? Why?”

  Eli smiled at me. “Spoken like someone who truly has been through the whole selection process successfully. There are lots of reasons to game the test: status, prestige, money—”

  “Money?” asked Dooley, suddenly interested.

  “Sure.” Eli chuckled. “There are only a few thousand able paranormals on the planet. If someone can get to second-level screening, there are those who would believe that’s enough evidence of some ability even if it’s not enough to be selected. Gaming the system lets the unscrupulous take advantage of the gullible.” Eli shook his head. “It’s not even true. Second-level screening is intended to weed out those who got through first-level screening. We only do full testing on those who pass through both levels.”

  “These are false credentials, then.”

  “You could call them that.” Eli looked out the window for a moment. “At least, they are false in that the first-level screening didn’t weed them out. We’re fairly certain candidates who have managed to pass through two levels of screening have something we want to examine.”

  I leaned forward. “I was told during testing that first-level screening only winnows out people who have abilities that can be tested for.”

  Eli stared at me. “There are those who believe that,” he said reluctantly.

  “So people with new abilities—abilities for which there are no tests—might show up in the primary test.”

  Eli cocked his head at me. “What do you mean?”

  “If someone had an ability but it didn’t fit any of the normal applicable abilities, would it show up on the primary test?”

  Eli sighed. “It’s not that simple. Do you know how the testing works?”

  I sat back. “Of course. I took the tests—”

  “No. I don’t mean how the test is administered or the nature of the test. Do you know how the test actually works?”

  Dooley interrupted. “Even if she does, I don’t. Explain it to me, Doctor.”

  Eli fiddled with a pencil on his desk. “Bohr and Heisenberg first legitimized witchery. Bohr’s mother was a demonstrable paranormal. The two of them presented a paper in 1937 showing that witchery was a physically reproducible phenomenon but had no more in common with relativity than it did with quantum physics. Physics has been in a strained state ever since. We have three competing models of how the universe operates: the Standard Model, Einstein’s Relativity and whatever dismal mathematics passes for a model of how the paranormal works. The rest of the physics community has managed to muddle on quite nicely by ignoring us.” Eli chuckled. “Oppenheimer said, ‘God may or may not play dice but he’s not above fixing the game.’”

  Eli continued. “But to investigate the phenomenon, you needed to actually find experimental partners. For whatever reason, we have been unable to reproduce paranormal effects in a laboratory or a particle accelerator. They can only be examined in the messy and unscientific human brain. How do you find such people? How do you train them? Herbert Bosch was a young physics and medical student in Copenhagen. He sought Bohr out and they both worked with Ellen Adler until she died in 1930. Bosch finished his degrees and moved to England. Bosch thought he could find behavioral markers that would show people of talent. Later, Bohr came to England as well to avoid the Nazis. He refused to work with Bosch and the paranormal. Instead, he worked on the bomb project. He preferred the simplicity of particle physics.”

  Eli leaned forward against the desk. “The brain is a single organ that does many things. They all affect one another. If you’re excited in one part of the brain, another part of the brain raises your heartbeat. If you’re upset about your wife, deep down in the amygdala, it affects your tennis game. Bosch was a physicist and physiologist. One area of his research was studying electrical behavior of language in the brain. He thought word associations would show a statistical pattern in talents that would be absent or different in the untalented. He developed the first pre-test—of course, at that point, it was the only test that seemed to work the least little bit. What it does is measure a pre-disposition towards the paranormal. No more than that.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Initially, the test was only marginally successful. But it did winnow out a population that could be examined. That led to refinement of the test. Barry Stevens developed some training for the abilities we were discovering—telekinesis, pyrokinesis, such as that. It was Stevens who first articulated the horizontal whisky problem.”

  Dooley glanced up. “I’ve heard of that.”

  “It was a big debate in the sixties between Stevens and Skinner. It’s largely been resolved.”

  “There’s no horizontal whisky problem?”

  “No new abilities have been discovered in twenty years. Just further refinements of what we already know. Regardless, Bosch refined the test against the results. By the middle fifties, it was administered right alongside achievement tests. Now, it’s all over the world.”

  Dooley wrote something down in his notebook. I tried to read it but couldn’t see the page.

  Dooley finished and looked up. “So the primary test can reveal ability even if you don’t know what ability that is.”

  “It can show pre-disposition. Not ability.”

  “If they show pre-disposition, the candidates are brought in for secondary testing?”

  “Usually.”

  “Usually?”

  Eli crossed his legs. “Look, the scoring of the test is a work in progress. A result that might be considered meaningful in 1961 could be determined to be insignificant in 1972. Or a result might be intriguing but useless in 1979 and could be shown to be important in 1982. The test itself changes. Ho
w do you reinterpret past results when the tool that created those results has itself changed? It’s hard work.”

  “So you don’t bring in everyone.”

  Eli nodded. “Through experience, we’ve learned that some result patterns show a pre-disposition that doesn’t manifest in secondary screening. Maybe it’s an ability—the ‘horizontal whisky’ problem. Likely not. Since we can’t do anything with it, it’s meaningless.”

  “They don’t pan out.”

  “Right.”

  “So nowadays, you don’t even bring them in.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But their scores are high.”

  “The scores are reported as numbers similar to the SATs: six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred. If someone scores a seven hundred on a pattern we know to be intransigent, we reduce it with a handicap.”

  Dooley watched Eli for a moment. “My score was five-fifty-six. You’re telling me I could really have a score of seven or eight hundred?”

  “It’s not a meaningful pattern. We downgrade the score to correct it.”

  “What’s the top score?”

  “The test is designed to the concept of a perfect score of a thousand.”

  I interrupted. “How do we get the raw pre-test scores? Before you downgrade them.”

  Eli gestured to the monitor. “They’re all on line.”

  “All of them? All the way back to the sixties?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’ll need access.”

  “Okay.” Eli looked at us both. “This sounds like it goes beyond federal mandate.”

  “It’s just due diligence,” said Dooley, putting his notebook back in his pocket.

  oOo

  Dooley stood outside, disk in hand. He tapped his notebook against his other palm, watching me. “Are you flying back or coming with me?”

  “I’m beat. I’ll come with you.” I looked at him when I got in the car. “Due diligence my ass.”

  “Yeah.” Dooley took a deep breath and let it out. “I was just pissed off my scores were downgraded. I wanted to make him pay a little bit. Petty of me.”

  “You don’t know they were downgraded. It just says ‘adjusted.’”

  “You’ll tell me later.” Dooley pulled out his keys and put them in the ignition. He didn’t start the engine. “What is your relationship with Dr. Boor?”