The Eidolon

by Libby McGugan

  Sattva’s eyes narrow. “Are you alright?”

  “I saw her... her abduction. It’s the second time.”

  “She’s trying to communicate with you.” Sattva leans forward and takes the goblet gently from my hand. “Is this hers?”

  “She made this last night.”

  Carefully, he hands it to Crowley, who holds it by its thin stem, twirling it round. “She’s still alive and she’s unharmed.” He frowns. “But I can’t see beyond it. Ach!” He returns the goblet to me with more gentility that I would have expected of him. “I don’t know how he’s doing it. Get changed into your clothes, Robert. You’ll get the best connection when you’re wearing them.”

  I put the goblet back in its box and the box into the pocket of my jeans. “You didn’t say anything about wearing them.” I hold up the shirt, sliced roughly up the middle in large jagged cuts.

  “Ah,” says Sattva.

  “What the hell have you been doing with those?” Crowley’s face folds into a frown. I wonder if it’s ever even tried to smile.

  “It’s a long story.”

  I lift up the jeans which are no better – two flapping strips of denim loosely attached to a few pockets. Something flitters from the back pocket to the floor, landing white side up, as Balaquai lifts the clothes out of my hands and lays them on the table. I reach down to pick up what’s fallen and see him out of the corner of my eye, running his finger up the cut seam of my jeans. I freeze, half crouched. The material of the clothes is folding over and meeting, joining under his open palms as if his will is a sewing needle. A bubble of nausea swells in my stomach and my eyes linger on the jeans as I fumble with one hand to pick up whatever it was that fell to the floor. A piece of card with something scribbled on it. I flip it over. It’s the photograph that Banks dropped at the ORB entrance. The faces of three women dusted in snowflakes – the one in the middle with the dangerous eyes, just like...

  I stare at her.

  “What are you looking at?” she snaps.

  I hand the photograph to her without speaking.

  She whips it out of my hand and looks down. “Where did you get this?” her voice is no more than a whisper.

  “Is there something you want to share with us?” says Sattva, glancing between Aiyana and me.

  Her eyes are fixed on me as she steps forward, brandishing the photograph like a knife. “Where did you get this?” There’s something untamed in her eyes, like she’s hanging on by a thread. A thread that’s beginning to fray. But then, she was murdered.

  “I found it on the floor at ORB when I was there – a guy called Peter Banks dropped it. I was going to give it back but...”

  “This photograph was sitting on my desk the night I was killed. My friends signed it, on our last holiday, see?” she turns it over and pushed it towards me. I already know what it says. She tells me anyway. “‘To lifelong friendship.’ So how come it ends up with you?”

  “I told you, I only picked it up.”

  “Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?” There’s no mistaking the accusation in her mockery.

  “Yeah, well there’s been a lot of that lately. I don’t know what happened to you, Aiyana. It had nothing to do with me.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” say Arcos. It’s not offered with any sense of appeasement – more that he’s just stating a fact.

  “How can you be so sure?” she says.

  “Because I’d know if he wasn’t.”

  “So this man, Peter Banks, works for Victor Amos?” says Sattva.

  “Yeah. A prospector.”

  “Robert, put this on.” Sattva reaches into his jacket pocket and hands me an oval stone threaded with a leather cord. Just like the ones they’re all wearing.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a stone.”

  “I can see that. What does it do?”

  “Think of it as a transceiver. It picks up and sends out signals. It focuses specific vibrations within the Field, helping us align with them. So if you were to think, for instance, of your memory of Mr Banks, the amulet can share it with us.”

  “But how does it...”

  “Oh, just put it on!” snaps Aiyana.

  I tie the leather cord round my neck. The stone is heavy and sits in the hollow between my collar bones.

  “So,” Sattva says. “Try to bring to mind any memory you have of Mr Banks.”

  I try to picture him; his dark hair, the scar on his left forearm, but it’s vague and distorted and I can’t get the details...

  “You’re trying too hard, Robert,” Balaquai says. His eyes are closed, frowning. “Just think of the situation where you met him, not the details of his face.”

  I take a breath and close my eyes. Okay. The car ride to ORB. I remember...

  There’s a sudden scorching sensation on my chest, like the stone has suddenly heated up. I reach for it, but before I can lift it free of my skin something out-burns it inside my skull, like a migraine but without the pain. An intense flash. When it dims, it leaves an image. No, it’s more than that. It’s like I’m actually there.

  I see Aiyana but not like she is now; she’s in a dim office corridor, her eyes are wide and she’s trying to scream, but she’s held by someone’s arm wrapped round her neck, a cloth pushed to her lips so that all that escapes is a muffled cry. She kicks her heels into his shins, flailing her arms behind her, reaching for his head while her chest rises and falls faster than it should, her face mottling to the colour of raw meat, blood appearing in the whites of her eyes that are growing wider. And then, like turning down a dimmer switch, the spark in them fades, softened then smothered by a cloudy haze. She stops struggling and slumps to the floor. The man reaches down and drags her body into an office, dumping it like litter beside the desk with the computer on it. He rolls up his sleeves, revealing a snakelike scar...

  “Aiyana! This is not about your memory!” bellows Arcos. “This was meant to be Robert’s!”

  “That’s him.” I turn to Sattva. “That’s Banks.”

  Sattva opens his eyes and glances at Arcos. “I think, on this occasion, a little longer spent down Aiyana’s memory lane might serve us.”

  The image is still there when I close my eyes.

  He pulls the cloth from her bloodstained mouth and stuffs it into a small plastic bag that he puts in his pocket. He starts the computer, takes out a memory stick from the pocket of his jeans, then plugs it in. Numbers count up on the screen. He taps his finger on the desk, waiting, then picks up the framed photograph by a mug of coffee that’s still steaming. It’s a portrait of three women huddled together, snowflakes suspended in the air around them – the same photograph Aiyana now has in her hand. Banks smashes the frame and stuffs the picture into his pocket. He leans over her lifeless body. “A little momento,” he whispers. He snatches her bag from the floor and rips it open, and her phone and wallet and diary tumble out.

  “Shit,” he hisses as he turns the bag upside down with his gloved hands and shakes it until a red memory key drops to the floor. As he reaches down for it, the numbers on the screen stop counting and in their place is a single flashing word.

  EXECUTE.

  He presses the return key. The image on the screen melts into red streaks like blood running down a wall. He pulls out the key and pockets it. He takes out his phone and holds it to his ear. “It’s me. I have it.”

  I open my eyes to see the glow fade from the amulets round the room. Aiyana’s face is pearly white against her dark hair and she sinks slowly into a chair, staring at the empty space in front of her.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She glances up at me, emerging from her reverie. Crowley makes a noise that sounds like Tchaw! and pokes the fire with his boot.

  “You’re sure that was Peter Banks?” asks Sattva.

  I nod.

  “And you’re sure that he works for Victor Amos?”

  “Yes. I can’t believe what he did – he has a wife. And a kid. But it was him, no
doubt.”

  “Then, Aiyana, perhaps we need to know what it was about your work that interests Amos so much. Tell us about it.”

  “I, eh...” She clears her throat and begins again. “I worked with a company called Geowatch. We monitored background electromagnetic radiation for health control – you know, from mobile networks, antennae, broadcasting stations, that kind of thing. But over the past few months I was tracking episodes of oscillations which were much stronger than anything we’d seen before.” She glances up at us, her face still pale. “They should have caused major disruption – blackouts, power failures, communications breakdown – but they didn’t. Nothing was affected that I could pick up. It was registering as electromagnetism, but it wasn’t behaving like it.”

  “What do you think caused it?” I ask.

  “I’ve no idea. At first I just put it down to anomalies, or monitoring errors, but that night I detected the biggest swing in recordings we’d had. Like a solar flare without the consequences. I went over it all – there were no recording errors. So I called Liam...”

  “Liam?” asks Balaquai.

  “Liam Bradbury. He’s, eh... he was a work associate.” She holds her palm in the candle flame and doesn’t take it away. There should be the smell of singeing flesh, a trickle of smoke; something. I wince, but she stares blindly at the flame, her hand white, unblemished. “Well, he was more than that.” Finally she lifts her hand and I breathe out. “He would have known what to do.”

  “Where did you find the oscillations?” Casimir asks.

  “Mostly around cities, big towns – densely populated areas. But it was just a sideline project – no-one really took much interest in it, because it wasn’t causing any obvious effects.”

  “Maybe it’s a good thing that you did,” Casimir says.

  “What does it matter now anyway? I gave my life up for that work. It wasn’t worth that.”

  “Too early to say,” says Balaquai. “You got Amos’s attention.”

  “Indeed,” says Sattva. “Robert, how likely is it that ORB will initiate the cyberattack?”

  “They’re confident they can crack the access code in time.”

  “Can’t you warn security at CERN to disconnect from the Grid?” says Balaquai.

  “No. Not until we find Cora; ORB will work out that I’ve warned them. It’s too risky.”

  “Anyway, that’s only a temporary solution,” says Casimir. “If we want to stop Amos, we need something more concrete.”

  I snort. “Like what? Sabotaging ORB?”

  They stare at me.

  “Wait a minute, I wasn’t serious.”

  “Why not?” asks Casimir. “You already have a program. Why not send it to them?”

  “It’s not compatible with their system, Casimir. Anyway ORB will be scanning all of my communications. Amos doesn’t trust me – if he did, he wouldn’t have taken hostages.”

  “Robert,” says Sattva, “if we could get you inside ORB, could you find a way to shut down their operations?”

  “This isn’t some school lab. It’s an underground fortress eight hundred miles away. You need retinal scanning authorisation to get anywhere inside.”

  “There are ways round that.”

  “What ways?”

  “Could you do it?”

  “I don’t know...”

  “And we could pay Peter Banks a visit,” says Balaquai, “to help us find the hostages.”

  “I’m in,” Aiyana says.

  Sattva reaches for the amulet round his neck, which begins to glow blue. “We don’t have much time, Robert. For this to work, you’re going to have to learn quickly and trust us. I’ll leave you in Arcos’s capable hands.” He gets to his feet. “We’ll meet on the warehouse rooftop at nightfall.”

  “I hope to God he’s ready by then,” says Crowley.

  “He will be.” Sattva smiles like he means it and walks out onto the balcony.

  “Right, you.” Crowley picks up a chair at the end of the table and slams it onto the floorboards. “Sit down.”

  Balaquai settles himself onto a sofa behind him, lounging back on the cushions like he’s about to watch TV. Casimir squats on the hearth to the side of the fire and Aiyana moves to the other end of the room, slumps into a chair and lays the photo on the table, her back to us.

  I lower myself into the wooden chair, feeling like I’m back at school with a teacher who’s in a bad mood. Crowley sits down opposite me and drags a glass half full of water across the table between us. Some of the contents slop over the edge and splash onto the wood.

  “Well, seeing as you’re the physicist, this shouldn’t take too long. But we don’t have all day, so pay attention. If you’re going to be any use to anyone, you need to start again with how you see things. Get rid of those preconceived ideas of how things are – because they’re not. The best you’ve got is an interpretation of what’s going on based on your senses. But those senses are only picking up one thing: vibration. It’s the language of energy, and you need to learn how to speak it. So.” He pushes the glass towards me. “What’s going on in that glass right now?”

  “Water molecules vibrating.”

  “Right.” He leans towards me, his eyes narrowing. “Now. Make it boil.”

  I stare back at him, at the twitch in his left eyelid in the flickering light from the fire.

  “It’s water. You need to apply heat to make it boil.”

  “No! You don’t! You need to make the molecules move faster, but it doesn’t matter how you do it!” He lets out a harsh, irritated sigh. “See the molecules...”

  “See them vibrating in my mind. Yeah, alright, I get it.”

  “Well, stop mincing about like a big girl, then, and get on with it.”

  The glass sits in front of me, like it should. An ordinary glass half-filled with ordinary water that ripples when I bump the table then settles down to form a predictable meniscus. Like it should.

  I sense Crowley’s impatience even before he says anything. “For God’s sake, man. I thought you were a physicist! You got the hang of gravity without too much bother, didn’t you? Without too much effort? Not fallen off yet, have you?” He stand up, leaning towards me, madness in his twitching eye, spraying a fine mist of spittle on my face. My blood’s beginning to boil. I hate his unrelenting disdain, his irritation, the way he looks at me like I’m filth. “You should know how things look on the quantum scale – or is it all just abstract thought and equations? Hmm? How about a little applied science? Otherwise, what’s the point?”

  Casimir clears his throat and shuffles a little on the hearth, his way of reminding us that there’s more than Crowley and me in the room. I see his shadow shift against the orange glow out of the corner of my eye.

  Crowley leans closer, his mouth contorting into a snarl. His breath smells like overripe cheese. “If you cared at all about seeing Cora and your father again, you’d get over yourself and your narrowmindedness.”

  Something snaps inside. I spring to my feet, facing him, white rage pulsing in my blood, my fist reaching to grasp his collar. “Enough!”

  An explosion; a shattering. Casimir shields his face with his arm, then peers out over his elbow, and I hear the scrape of Aiyana’s chair. Beneath me, on the table, splintered glass lies strewn across the wood, and steam rises from the puddle of water spilling between the fragments and dripping onto the floor.

  Crowley’s voice is quiet for the first time. “Now do you believe me?” I drag my gaze from the hissing debris. His eyes are level with mine, intense and unblinking, the twitch in his eyelid gone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I BREAK FIVE more glasses in the course of learning to make water boil, but I’m beginning to get a feel for it. That’s what it is, really. It’s not just visualising, although that’s part of it, but it’s also the awareness of a rising energy, of speed, like you get on a roller coaster as it tips over the crest of the drop and begins to accelerate – that feeling of exponential momentum –
but taking that and applying it to water in a glass. Shit, Robert, if you could hear yourself. The first time the water boils it feels like I’ve broken through a barrier I didn’t even know was there. Like I’m on the edge of something huge.

  When I look at Crowley now, there’s a glimmer of something approaching respect in his eyes; or, at the very least, less reproach.

  We move on from water. Crowley is trying to get me to light an extinguished candle using only my will. The wick sits cold, stubborn and unlit. This is too much for me. A flame too far. As Crowley huffs and grumbles at my incompetence, the amulet round his neck begins to glow. He glances up at Balaquai, who is already on his feet, his amulet shining in the same way.

  “Best you stay here,” Crowley says. “Keep going on your candle for now. And get to work on thinking how to disable ORB’s systems. We’ll be back when we can.”

  I glance back at Casimir as they walk out onto the balcony. “Where are they off to?”

  “They’re responding to signals, like they did with you.”

  I get up and walk over to the edge of the balcony. There’s no sign of them. “And where did Sattva go?”

  Casimir, who’s followed me out, is looking up at the sky. “Anyone’s guess.”

  We go back inside and Casimir takes a seat by the fire. “You’re doing well,” he says. “If you’re open to it, it doesn’t take that long.”

  “What does it feel like, being, you know... dead?”

  “No different, really.” He runs his hand over the unlit candle and a flame comes to life. “No, that’s not true. It’s better. It’s freer, like you’re not constrained by your old assumptions. It’s a perceptual difference, more than anything.”

  “There really are other worlds, then?”

  “Right here, coexisting with this one.” He blows out the candle and pushes it towards me.