Welcome to Witchlandia

by Steven Popkes

  It came to me. I was going to save her. Our being together was no longer important. My obsession with her was no longer important. Who we had been to each other and my obsession had been of the past. The past was gone. I was going to save her now.

  The BSO picked up the high note as I brought up the run from deep down in the bowels of the piano and we all came together in a great dissonant crash—which the FV almost immediately resolved. And I backed him up as the orchestra rearranged the chaos into that final major chord. We held it, faded on it and stopped.

  There was dead silence in the theater.

  Then, down in the audience applause erupted. People stood and whistled. Called out.

  The FV, red and sweaty, smiled and waved at them. Levine leaned against the podium wearily. I looked out. I saw Hoffman, now. And Eli. In the back I could see Rush and he had some men with him.

  Oh, yeah, I thought, suddenly depressed.

  No. Stand up straight. Don’t forget. You’re going to save her.

  oOo

  Hoffman indicated stage left.

  I shook Levine’s hand, shook the hand of the First Violin. Smiled. Chatted. Tried to look at ease but at the same time tense. I confided privately to Levine that I needed to find the rest room. He nodded.

  I exited stage left.

  Eli was waiting for me there, confused.

  “Come on.” I grabbed his arm and we walked past the dressing rooms and prop areas, down the back stairs and out the alley door onto Saint Stephens Avenue.

  I flagged down a fortuitous cab and bundled us in. We turned onto Mass Ave just as Hoffman and Rush were turning the corner. Rush looked furious, Hoffman dejected. Rush looked around and I dragged Eli down.

  “Where to?” asked the driver.

  “New England Aquarium,” I said.

  The cab turned onto Huntington and I chanced a look back. Rush was scanning the traffic but didn’t seem interested in this particular cab.

  Eli sat up slowly. “What was that all about?”

  “The police are trying to keep an eye on me.”

  He smiled uncertainly. “This must have something to do with Katelin and that Officer Dooley that came to see me a few days ago.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Tell me more.”

  I was about to but then I remembered Dooley saying he wanted to be in on the conversation. “It’ll have to wait.”

  “Until we get away,” Eli said. He laughed. “I think I’ve waited my whole life for something this exciting. If I could yell ‘follow that car!’ my life would be complete.”

  I allowed myself a smile. “We’ll see what we can do.”

  “What car?” said the driver in confusion.

  “Never mind,” I said. I pointed ahead. “New England Aquarium.”

  oOo

  The New England Aquarium building housed one of the biggest captive animal collections on the Atlantic coast. But that wasn’t what interested us. Next door were the Aquarium Docks from which whale watch, harbor tourist and night watch trips departed. It was near dark, now. The Nonantum would be boarding. Joey needed to get out of the harbor proper and up into Salem Sound and Nahant Bay before actual night fell. He would have to anchor and put up an identifying light to prevent collisions. Which meant leaving the docks very, very soon.

  The cab reached the front of the Aquarium. I paid him and dragged Eli across the plaza and down the ramp. Sure enough, the Nonantum was boarding at the end of the dock. I waved.

  Joey was wearing a suit—which I had somehow never expected.

  “You know, I was hoping you’d show up,” he said as we came on board. “I needed some entertainment on the trip out there.”

  “Beg pardon?” I stared at him.

  Joey pointed towards the bow with his chin as he disconnected the gangplank. I looked in that direction and saw my electric piano set up.

  He put his hand on my shoulder—a reach but he managed. “You have no idea how I filled up the boat when I announced you were coming.”

  “You didn’t advertise, did you?” Suddenly nervous.

  He shook his head. “Of course not. Word of mouth. Now you have an excuse to be here.”

  Joey moved forward. “Ready with the ropes,” he called.

  Dooley, in a tuxedo, moved smoothly past me, undid the stern rope and then moved forward to the bow.

  “The police wanted to prevent this?” asked Eli.

  “They’re purists,” I said. “They only want me to play the classics. No sense of adventure.”

  Chapter 3.5: Saturday Evening, October 30

  Eli circulated while I played. Blues, mostly. A little Couperin and Saint-Saen. A Debussy or two. But I kept coming back to the blues. I wished I had a singer. Blues begs for a voice.

  Once we were anchored in the bay Joey dimmed the lights to almost nothing—just a few faint lights around the deck to keep people from falling into the water and to help them find the snacks. Then, he put up a single dim green light and hushed us.

  A moment later we were buzzed by a dim shape in the night—a laugh. A cry of pure delight. Then, there were two. Then, perhaps a dozen.

  I watched the shapes—some carried faint lights. One woman—I think it was a woman—had painted her face and hands with glowing paint and liked nothing more than to hover over us and look down. Those that flew into the light had painted their faces as well: devil masks, skulls, blood.

  This was Halloween and the witches were in flight.

  Joey stood next to me.

  “I never thought they would play with the boat,” I said softly. “I thought we’d just be spectators out here. Not—participants.”

  “What’s theater without an audience?” Joey said with a chuckle. “You should know that.”

  I looked at him. He was watching the witches flying with a big grin. “Just wait.”

  The witches were done with us for a moment. They chased each other in elaborate swirls—figure eights, circles, spirals.

  A long bright filament trailed out behind one flyer, neon orange. Two others rolled out different colors. They spun around each other leaving an elaborate glowing braid hundreds of feet long across the water. They separated, doubled back on each other and rose vertically. The flyers were invisible; only the filaments could be seen.

  The filaments started to pulse so that the light moved behind them. The flyers synchronized their speeds to the movement of the filament so that the light didn’t appear to move so much as be created at one end and disappear at the other end. The circles and curves were now so tight that the only mark of the flyer was a break between the beginning of the filament and the end.

  They came down to the water and looped horizontally. Then, the flyers rose, bringing the light with them in spring-shaped spirals. They interleaved, a complex triple helix reaching from the water high in the air, narrowing, nearly touching. Then, the light at one end seemed to stop. The remaining light was drawn up into the darkness, a diminishing thread until with a bright flash, it disappeared.

  On the boat we breathed out in a collective sigh and applauded.

  Then, high in the air, a star seemed to fall. It grew brighter as it fell until just before it struck the water, a flash and the concussion of an explosion.

  I looked at Joey, confused.

  “Flyers teamed with pyrogens and levitators,” he said next to me. “A bunch of pairs—these guys have been practicing for this all year long.”

  Imagine intelligent fireworks: rockets that burned and sputtered, dancing together before the inevitable explosion, the sparks swirling together into patterns: mandalas, rivers, an occasional pixellated face or landscape. Once, perhaps a dozen flyers circled the boat, vertical fountains of sparks erupting behind them, reflecting in the water: Nonantum floated in an ocean of fire.

  “These were the athletes that failed out of competition?” I said to Joey. “What could the winners do?”

  Joey put his hand on my shoulder. “I think there’s a lot of talent
that comes that doesn’t participate in the events. They come for this.”

  “I never knew.”

  “From shore it just looks like elaborate fireworks. You can’t see the detail. They’re not doing it for us. They do it for each other—we just happen to be convenient props they can have fun with.”

  I wondered if Katelin knew about this. Surely, she must. How could something like this not be known throughout the flyer community? On the other hand, how could something like this not be publicized across the world?

  Joey seemed to read my mind. “It’s not legal. If it were a real public event the FAA would have to step in. It only exists as long as it’s under the covers.” He sighed. “It’ll get squashed some day. But hopefully not soon.”

  We passed perhaps an hour there. We paid no attention to anything but the flyers and their partners. Then, the fireworks tailed off and the remaining flyers were painted as figures: pterodactyls, bats, birds. From dramatic to subtle. Fortissimo to pianissimo.

  He gave me a quick glance, then watched his clients. “This is going to fade over the next hour. You go on downstairs with Dooley and that guy you brought. I can manage things up here.”

  With that he stepped behind a big woman leaning too far back in her heels. He steadied her effortlessly. “Careful there, Mrs. Carstairs.”

  The woman murmured a rapt “thank you”, never tearing her eyes away from the sky.

  I snagged Eli and made my way to the cabin door. Dooley was waiting for me.

  oOo

  Dooley led us through a maze of provisions towards the galley.

  “They eat all this?” I asked.

  “This is for the whole weekend. Joey said he’d have to stock up again on Monday.”

  “Then they do eat all this?”

  “The upper crust eats well.”

  Eli laughed, bringing up the rear. “Not that well,” he said. “I never had dinner.”

  “Should have eaten the snacks out there,” Dooley growled. “I worked on them hard enough.”

  We made it to the galley. Eli sat down and scooted over to the far end of the table.

  I looked around. I knew how much work had gone on. This galley was clean. I had never seen it so clean.

  Dooley caught my glance. “Joey’s a slave driver.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Is there coffee?” asked Eli hopefully.

  Dooley filled mugs for all three of us from the big coffee maker on the counter. “Okay,” he said as he sat down and passed us our mugs. “Let’s talk.”

  “I’ll go first,” I said. “Eli: I always thought the different personalities in my head were just in my head. Gerald, Amanda, Donald—they weren’t real.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Eli.

  “But they were real.”

  “You’re not being precise enough, David.” Eli sipped his coffee. “Personalities in a case of MPD case are very real.”

  “You’re hiding things.” Dooley measured his words, each word a tap on the table with his finger. “Don’t. Be. Coy.”

  “Fair enough.” Eli nodded. “You mean you were convinced the personalities of Amanda, Gerald and Donald were limited by your mind. For the longest time, David, so were we.”

  “Go on,” I said. I leaned forward.

  “Bohr brought the paranormal out of the closet and carefully placed it in the middle of the physical world. He didn’t figure out how it worked, you understand, any more than chemists understood ionic bonds back in the time of Lavoisier. But Lavoisier didn’t need to know about them to determine the constancy of mass, and Bohr didn’t need a physical model to demonstrate the paranormal. He had his mother.”

  Eli leaned forward. “We don’t know a lot more even today. Imagine Galileo having to demonstrate the principles of falling bodies but limited to chickens as his laboratory materials. Imagine Newton trying to formulate force equations limited to experimenting with goats. That’s the position of paranormal physicists. If it wasn’t for Bosch’s work we wouldn’t even have any of the tests.”

  “You have my sympathy,” said Dooley sarcastically.

  “I’m not complaining. I’m trying to provide context. The preliminary test is very good at spotting something we don’t understand in people who have no idea what they’ve got. When we discovered David,” he nodded at me, “we knew he was special. First, his tests results were variable, from sub-normal to off the charts. Often in the same day.”

  “I don’t remember being tested that much.”

  “Remember the games we played? Word games? Games with pictures? Story games? They were all child versions of the secondary screening tests.”

  “Oh.” It’s an odd feeling to realize most of what you knew about your past was wrong.

  Eli continued: “So we knew we had something. But we had no idea what it was. You see, there are two unique aspects of the paranormal. One is that it exists at all. How do you cause force to be applied to an object without an intervening medium? All other energy transfers require a medium—a lever, a wheel, steam, something—but not paranormal actions. It’s all ‘spooky action at a distance’ under human control. The second is the way it consumes energy.”

  “That’s why Katelin was always eating,” I said.

  “That’s part of it. Certainly, paranormal activity consumes energy. Conservation of energy and conservation of momentum must be observed—that seems to be required of everything, even witches. And it’s very true that paranormal energy transfer—however it’s going on—seems to require that. This is not a perpetual motion machine. But it doesn’t all come from the witch.”

  “But Katelin’s always eating—”

  Eli waved it away. “I know it requires energy from the witch, but the witch can’t supply enough. An Olympic bicycling athlete burns up more than half a horsepower in the time trials in a controlled environment and low speeds. That’s the equivalent of a big ice cream sundae—two, really, since digestion is only about 50% efficient. Katelin expends that much energy flying ten minutes at forty miles an hour. Witchflying is more efficient than bicycling but not that much more efficient. And while Katelin needs more energy than most human beings, she doesn’t need to eat the equivalent of a dozen sundaes a day. Not to mention other lower energy paranormal activities also require considerable food consumption by the witch. Martin believes that the energy required from the witch is to enable the energy transfer but does not execute the energy transfer itself.”

  “Where does the energy come from?” I swirled the coffee in my cup and tried to get my head around this.

  Eli shrugged. “We’re not sure. If you can effect an energy sink without an effecter it means you can probably effect an energy source the same way. It could be anywhere. I mean we looked. There’s some evidence that the temperature drops in the local area of the event. Some geographical areas appear to be have more available energy than others, suggesting there is some sort of locality—”

  “Bring us back to David,” Dooley said quietly.

  Eli stopped, startled. “Yes. Of course. We couldn’t figure out if David had Multiple Personality Disorder or if he was housing parasitic paranormal intelligences.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Intelligences that are composed of the same physical phenomena that comprise paranormal phenomena but require a human brain as a host.” Eli looked at me crossly. “I can’t put it much simpler than that.”

  “You weren’t sure if Gerald, Amanda and Donald were real or not.”

  Eli nodded. “Right. On the ‘real’ side: when they were active your paranormal tests results dropped to normal or below. That doesn’t happen with MPDs. On the ‘not-so-real’ side, you weren’t manifesting an ounce of paranormal activity other than the personalities.”

  “Which is why you brought him to McLean,” said Dooley.

  “Exactly. Then, one day all three of them were gone. There was no evidence of any extra personalities whatsoever.” Eli gave me an accusatory glance. “You jus
t said you got rid of them.”

  Dooley turned to me. “There was a fourth personality: Misty.”

  “Yes.” I had finished my coffee and found myself fiddling with the cup. “Misty came to me after I’d been in McLean a couple of years. She showed me how to play the piano.”

  “And how to get rid of the others,” Dooley said gently.

  “Yes.”

  “Eventually, you got rid of her, too.” Dooley kept looking at me.

  “Yes.”

  “Wait,” interrupted Eli. “There was a fourth personality?”

  “Right,” I said. “And it’s possessed Katelin.”

  Eli looked bewildered. “Against her will? That’s impossible.”

  “Why not?” An edge crept into Dooley’s voice. “Who’s to say it can’t happen?”

  “I mean—”

  “You had special knowledge about David, didn’t you?” Dooley leaned forward, suddenly looking every inch a cop. “You knew there was something special about David long before you ran a test. A little bird told you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes. You do. It’s the horizontal whisky problem. If you weren’t looking for David you would never have found him.” Dooley stared at him for a long time. “Dr. Boor, it’s time I met Martin Miegle.”

  Something happened to Eli’s face. The expression, the set of the jaw, the skin around his eyes.

  “Officer Dooley,” said Martin Miegle. “How can I help you?”

  oOo

  It was the voice I’d heard on the phone a score of times. I’d never met him in person, but there was no doubt who I was looking at.

  “Creepy. But not in a bad way,” Dooley said with a low chuckle.

  I looked at him questioningly.

  “Something Loquess said about him.”

  Miegle didn’t respond. He just watched us.

  “You’re like Misty?” I didn’t know what to think.

  Miegle shook his head. “No. I’m more like Gerald, Amanda and Donald. Misty is different from all of us.”