Rather than shying away, it drifted closer.
Habituated. Had to be. No wild dolphin would act this friendly.
Standing next to it now, he observed a greenish tint on the skin, possibly an algae. The dolphin allowed a gentle brush of his hand; a green residue clouded the water.
He leaned close to check the eye—
The eye was gone, nothing but an empty socket oozing green.
“What the—!”
The dolphin sidled closer, and he could sense the rules of the encounter changing. Now the dolphin was pressing into his space and he was the one feeling timid. He fought off the feelings, reached to examine the flank—
His hand passed through the skin as if it were sodden newspaper. The flesh within felt like goo between his fingers. When he yanked his hand away, it was coated in green slime. A cloud of green billowed out of the dolphin’s flank, fouling the water.
What was this? Another algae? Another plague of phytoplankton? He clambered in the skiff for a sample jar, dipped it into the green cloud . . .
The dolphin rolled lazily onto its side. The movement drew his attention. He turned his head, looked into the wound his hand had made.
The wound tore open, and green slime exploded into his face. All he saw was oozing, shimmering green.
And then nothing.
CHAPTER
2
A Recluse
To be left alone.
All I wanted was to be left alone in the quiet of my condo, my universe, the door locked, the phone turned off, safely sequestered against any more high-minded talk of adventure, especially of—oh, a plague on the notion!—saving the world. To hear such themes, to even think of them, brought a visceral twisting I feared would destroy me, and only served to remind me how futile and illusory life can be and what a fool I’d been.
I trusted. I believed.
So I was used and played for a fool.
The story of my life.
The doorbell startled me as if it were a clap of thunder. I had been enjoying an hours-long stupor, sitting in my easy chair, staring at the opposite wall. Having expended any reason I ever had to go on living or thinking, it seemed a reasonable behavior, and besides, at least I could be confident the wall was really there. I could turn away, then look again, and it would still be there. I thought I would start with that.
But then came this, this invasion! “Go away or die!”
“Professor! Come on, McKinney, open up!”
Yes, I thought with a deflating sigh, now let death come. It was Brenda Barnick.
I shattered my own stillness. “You are uninvited, unwelcome, and unliked, so be on your way!”
“Well kiss my—!”
I won’t repeat it, but she did say it, and having heard it, I couldn’t let it go. I bolted from my chair, crossed the room, and opened the door to the defiant tattooist. She was leaning on my doorpost, unruffled—save for her dreadlocks. They were always that way.
“I’m sure this isn’t a social call,” I said.
She thought a moment, then conceded, “No, I guess not.”
“Then state your business.”
She arched her eyebrows and asked, “Where’s Andi?”
Andi Goldstein, my young assistant, still remained in my employ despite my exile from the world. Every other morning I would slip a grocery and errand list under the door. That evening, I would retrieve groceries, mail, laundry, whatever was on the list, from the front walk, and all without a word or disturbance. “At this precise time, I wouldn’t know.”
Barnick waved some lists in my face, about a week’s worth. “And you haven’t seen her in a while, have you?”
I took the lists from her. Had Andi missed that many days? I was getting low on milk and whole-grain bread; since most of the mail was junk I hadn’t fretted over that. The days all ran together. “No, I haven’t seen her.”
Barnick searched the sky with wide, rolling eyes and asked, “So don’t that bother you?”
“It most certainly does. I’ll have to have a word with her.”
While the forsaken lists diverted my attention—yes, I’d listed dish soap and mouthwash and now, come to think of it, I’d run out—Barnick slipped past me and into my living room, waving her arms with agitation. “Man, what is up with you?”
I stood aghast at the trespass, and had it been anyone else I suppose I would have taken action—which in itself surprised me. Of all people, I was extending grace toward Barnick? It couldn’t be for her coarse manners; perhaps it was for the reliability of her gift. “You have to ask? You’re the one who drew the picture. Remember? Cardinal Hartmann’s chair?”
She remembered, all right. She was still carrying that drawing in her back pocket like unfinished business, and as she pulled it out and unfolded it, it still spoke the truth. She’d drawn a blue velvet armchair with peeling gold paint on the arms, but the main point of the drawing was that the chair was empty. She looked at it, then at me, and as I expected, she knew. “He was never there.”
“Exactly.” I’d been over and over our hapless venture into the Vatican for our supposed meeting with my oldest and dearest friend, and every revisit brought the same pain, the same anger. We’d all been had. To offer my evidence, I went to my desk and brought back the note handed to me by Hartmann’s withered little assistant. “You’ve been wanting to see this.”
She took it from my hand. Though she read silently, I could discern her reaction to each little phrase because I had it memorized: Dear Dr. McKinney: I regret that I cannot be present. You are to give the spear to my assistant. Many thanks to you and your team for a job well done. Cardinal Hartmann.
She looked up at me, and I could see the dots connecting. “Hartmann didn’t write this.”
“Cardinal Justus Hartmann was my mentor, my wisdom, the only man who stood by me during my personal Inquisition and the only man I ever fully trusted. I came to address him as Cardinal Justus, or Justus, he came to address me as James, and in any correspondence he ever sent me, he addressed me as James and signed it Justus.”
“It’s a kiss-off!” she exclaimed. “Thanks, good-bye, don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
“Which never could have happened with my old friend unless he were dead . . . and someone used my adoration for the man against me, against all of us.”
“Oh man. Ohhh man . . .” I could see the downward spiral in her eyes, the falling of the dominoes as she sank into a chair at the table. “All that trouble we went to . . .” She evoked the sacredness of manure and looked to me for help.
But what could I give her other than the truth? “We were talking to a holographic image projected from—where? The other universe we bought into? The skinny old assistant was from that other universe; you could tell by the shifting color of his eyes, the same as we saw with Helsa, the Girl.” Nausea took hold of me, and I sank into a chair, as well. “Which means the scroll went full circle. It was brought to us by the Girl, and of course it needed translating, as every mysterious scroll does, so haplessly, naïvely, we—that is, I—brought it to a phony Hartmann and his assistant, both from the same other universe, which means we brought it to the same people who sent it in the first place. It was a scam to rope us in. The Vatican was never expecting us. We were never invited to a real meeting with real people and had no real appointment scheduled. If I’d stopped all my blustering and listened to the receptionist, he would have been able to tell us there was no Cardinal Hartmann because Hartmann was no longer living. It’s all to my shame.”
“So that’s why security bounced us out of there.”
I could feel the bitterness in my soul; I could taste it in my mouth. “Because, without permission or appointment, we sneaked our way up to that meeting . . . guided entirely by young Daniel.”
Yes, her turn of mood was expected. “Hey, now wait a minute.”
“Daniel Petrovski, a lad with supernatural insight, who freely communicates with unseen people, be they angels or denizens of another universe . . .
knew exactly where to take us—twice!—and yet, strangely enough, had no clue that the whole thing was a fraud, that we were being deceived.”
“That is not fair!”
“I’ve had time to think about it. Once you’ve taken the time—”
“Daniel wouldn’t do that!”
She was raising her voice. I determined not to raise mine, though I couldn’t help the steely tone. “Daniel was working for them.”
She was getting too uncomfortable to remain seated. “I ain’t listening to this!”
“The puppeteer operating that hologram already knew where the spear was: ‘The feast is in the kitchen.’ All these multi-universe charlatans needed was someone to do their dirty work. So they concocted a scroll to convince us we were a team, and now, thanks to us, they have the spear to do with as they will.”
She glared at me, which, I suppose, was all she could do.
I could feel the twisting of my viscera, the pain and chagrin as I made my confession. “I trusted. I believed. That was my fatal error. And that, Ms. Barnick, is ‘what’s up with me.’” I leaned back and stared at the wall. “At any rate, there, I’ve begun the process for you. With any honesty, you’ll come to the same findings as I did. We are not a team, we have no mission, and speaking for myself, whatever game these liars and impersonators are playing, I am out. Oh, and as for Daniel Petrovski, you might have a word with your young charge and find out what game he was playing. I will have a satisfactory explanation before I ever see his face again.”
“So what about Andi?”
“What about her?”
“She’s in Florida.”
My gaze shot back at her. “Florida?”
“I got a call from her grandmother.”
Barnick. Such a gift for irking me. “You knew this all along?”
“That’s why I’m here. You won’t answer your phone, so she called me.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Because I got the distinct impression that you didn’t give a rip, not about Andi, not about anybody.”
I dodged that. “So now you’re going to tell me she’s seeing UFOs again? More dead birds and fish? Haven’t we already been through all that, and wasn’t it a waste of time like everything else?”
“She’s had some kind of mental collapse. She’s in the hospital, confined in a behavioral health unit.”
I stared at her.
She held up two plane tickets. “And these came FedEx from Andi’s grandmother.”
I had convinced myself that nothing mattered anymore—until now. “I’ll pack some things.”
CHAPTER
3
Andi
The “team” did not fly to Tampa, Florida. I flew to Tampa, Florida, and only because of Andi. Because of the plane tickets, Brenda took the same plane, and for financial reasons, we went in together on a rental car. We drove straight from the airport to the hospital, and Andi’s grandparents met us there, which was a good thing. The behavioral health unit was in a secure facility—I’ll use the word prison. Without the signed clearance Andi’s sabba and safta—alias Jacob and Sadie Goldstein—filed with Physician’s Assistant Matilda Fornby at the front desk, Fornby would not have opened the ponderous, automatic door that sealed the unit against the outside world—and vice versa.
A Dr. Lawrence led us through the “Social Environment” in which residents could freely move about and mingle, and through another secure door into the “Special Care Environment” where residents, for their own safety, were confined in cell-like rooms. He led us to Room 4, unlocked the door, and brought us into the darkened room. It was sparsely, safely furnished: a bed arranged atop a solid box, no frame that might be disassembled and used for a tool or weapon; a padded chair bolted to the floor; a breakaway light fixture that could not support the weight of a human trying to hang herself. The shade was drawn over the window; the light was turned off. The occupant was mostly a silhouette until we came closer.
I was unprepared. This couldn’t be Andi, the bright, fright-wigged prodigy we’d come to appreciate and whom I regarded as irreplaceable: the red-haired, razor-minded seer of numbers, patterns, probabilities, and calculations. This was, by all appearances, a quintessential lunatic, perched in a padded chair, dressed in a hospital jumpsuit, rocking incessantly. If she was aware of our presence she gave no indication. Wild-eyed, as if seeing visions, she was having an animated conversation with someone who wasn’t there. “Oh, Atafina, that is so, that is so. It is the self . . . the self that is not . . . nor should it be . . . for to be truly one is not to be at all.”
I rested on my knee at her eye level. “Andi?” She didn’t notice me, didn’t stop her ramblings.
“She’s become unresponsive to human interaction,” said Dr. Lawrence. “It’s like she isn’t in this world anymore.”
Sadie said, “When she showed up at our door she acted lost, like she didn’t know where she was, but she still knew who we were. But that was a week ago, and now . . .”
Jacob put a comforting arm around her. “She kept getting worse until she didn’t know who we were, and then she started wandering at night. We spent all our time looking for her. She’d walk for miles with no idea where she was.”
“And she’d do it again if she could,” said the doctor. “We have to confine her for her own safety.”
“Why the dark room?” Brenda asked.
The doctor, learned man that he was, only shrugged. “She prefers it that way.”
Andi’s face brightened as she looked and reached toward the ceiling. “The orbs! Oh, hello! How lovely to see you! Orb One, Orb Two . . . How do you do!”
Brenda shot me a glance. Oh no, I thought. Are we to go there again?
“Our saviors,” Andi cried in dopey ecstasy. “Lights, transcendent minds to show us the way!”
“Looks like they’re back,” Brenda whispered to me.
I held my peace though I could feel my face flushing. Our last trip to Florida was a bitter memory. We wasted hours, days, investigating smelly piles of dead birds and fish, and whatever the real cause of the mass die-offs, Andi, Brenda, and Tank—aided by Daniel, of course—were too distracted by madness and delusion for us to ever find it. Rather than a scientific explanation, they opted for strange lights in the sky, illusory alien beings, invisible evil. I discounted any notion of extraterrestrials and demons then, and I most certainly did not entertain such theories now. I even found it affirming that new claims of such things as “orbs” and global saviors were originating exactly where one should expect to find them: in the ravings of a lunatic.
I sighed, hands over my face. Our lunatic. Our dear Andi. If not the beings or spirits or flying saucers Brenda was referring to, the old delusions had returned, and to a tragic degree. I questioned the doctor. “And what are you doing about this?”
“The blood tests came out negative,” he said. “No hallucinogenic drugs as far as we could tell. But the MRI and brain scan did indicate an abnormal stimulation of the central nervous system. We’ll be doing some more tests to track that down.”
“Why aren’t you doing them now?”
“Professor—” Brenda cautioned.
“What are you waiting for, another day’s rent for this jail cell?”
An orderly knocked, then opened the door. Another visitor entered and I winced at the timing.
Bjorn Christiansen. Out of place, unexpected, uninvited, perhaps the last person I wanted to see at a time like this. Enormous and muscular, he was a could-have-been football star who gave it up to be a part of our “team.” What a dreadful mistake that was.
“Hi, team!” he said quietly. At least he knew he was in a hospital.
“Hi, Cowboy,” said Brenda.
If he calls us a team again . . . I thought, but said, “Hi, Tank.”
He approached, his eyes on Andi and more dismayed with each step, until he sank onto the edge of the bed, plainly bewildered and saddened.
“It must fill the earth,�
� said Andi, looking into space. “Fill and subdue it. The lord of the mind, the heart, the body . . .” She began to tap and scratch nervously on the arm of the chair, a weird, nervous tic.
I looked at the doctor. He watched her hand. He brought up his clipboard and made a note of it.
“Andi?” Tank said.
Her eyes followed an invisible someone as if they had come in through the ceiling and stood by the window. She smiled at them.
“Wow,” Tank said softly to the rest of us. “Kind of like Daniel does when that angel’s with him.”
All right. I admit I’m not an agreeable person sometimes. Today, at this time, not at all. “Tank . . .” I tried to keep my voice down. “She is out of her mind. She has been inflicted with delusions for which we have neither cause nor remedy. Kindly update yourself before lapsing into such stupidity!”
Brenda put her hand on Tank’s arm. “Things are kind of tense right now.”
He seemed to understand.
“Just what are you doing here, anyway?” I asked. “I don’t recall inviting you.”
He nodded toward Brenda. She acknowledged her culpability by arching her eyebrows at me.
I glared back at her; I did not welcome him.
“I gotta be here,” Tank said. “We’re a team.”
There it was, the flame to my fuse. I had to get out of there. I got up to leave. That meant leaving Andi. I paced back, glared at him.
“Professor . . .” Brenda cautioned me, again.
“A team? How did you ever get such a ludicrous impression?”
His gaze went from me to Brenda and back again. “Well, all the stuff we’ve been through together, the note, the scroll—”
“The scroll!”
The doctor got into it. “Mr., uh . . .” He had to look at his clipboard.
“McKinney.”
“Mr. McKinney—”
“Doctor to you . . . Doctor!”
“Dr. McKinney, pipe down right now or you’re out of here.”
I had to admire his spine. Well done.
I piped down, if only for Andi. “Mr. Teammate—” I didn’t pinch his cheeks, but my tone did as much. “Since we’re to be a team, perhaps you can establish that by making yourself useful.” I paused for effect, then nodded toward Andi. “Heal her.”
The Assault: The Revealing, Infestation, Infiltration, The Fog Page 7