by Dale Bailey
Keel turned, gazing the length of the corridor—past the elevator bay and the cluster of common rooms to the far end, the suites belonging to Lomax and Abel Williams, the door into the unrenovated wing, the south stairwell with its glimmering red EXIT beacon. Memory beckoned: the moment in the lobby, that sense of presence stirring. And something else, something further back that he didn’t want to think about, that he wouldn’t think about—
Instead, he listened, listened with every fiber of his body, listened as few people even knew a man could listen. He listened as he had been trained to listen, with the taut suspension of being that comes when your life hangs on detecting an enemy in the next room: a stealthy scrape of boot leather, a hiss of indrawn breath. He listened.
And he heard nothing.
Not a footfall on the plushly carpeted floor, not a grunt of exertion from the weight room. Not even the timpani of his own restless heart. It was his mind playing tricks on him, that’s all, a product of Lomax’s relentless litany of horrors.
Screw it.
Keel turned back toward his room—and once again a noise stopped him in his tracks. This time there was no mistaking it: It was a woman’s voice—
—Lisa it sounded like Lisa—
—soft, alluring, beckoning him the length of the corridor.
John, it whispered, John, and almost against his will, Keel found himself responding, flesh stirring, blood throbbing at his temples. He lifted his hand. He took a hesitant step back down the hallway, toward the south stairwell, and then another, and then he forced himself to stop. He stood rigidly, listening, a muscle leaping in his jaw—
“Fletcher?”
He came to himself with a start. The hallway stretched before him, shorter now. The south stairwell loomed closer. Had he come so far?
Turning, he saw the doctor, Lara, standing hipshot in the doorway of the infirmary, her arms crossed over her breasts, her head cocked quizzically. Her eyes narrowed, and he became suddenly—embarrassingly—conscious of his enormous arousal, his penis straining against the clinging fleece of his sweats.
“You okay?” she said, and suddenly the night’s dreams flooded back to him, the long smooth lines of her thighs, the taste of her flesh, her nipples ripening under his tongue.
He licked his lips, dredging words from the dry lakebed of his belly. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m—I’m fine.”
Then with as much dignity as he could muster, he started past her, down the endless corridor to his suite. Inside, with the door locked behind him, he masturbated furiously.
4
In the long gray light of the afternoon, Ben and Abel sat in the lounge. Keel, on the far side of the room, stalked around the pool table, cue in hand. In the intervals between the crack of billiard balls came the constant electrical whir of the treadmill.
“So what do you know about automatic writing?” Ben said.
Abel looked up from his book.
“What?”
“Automatic writing. What do you know about it?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Curious, that’s all.”
Abel thought about that.
“The thing is,” he said finally, “whenever a writer gets curious, I tend to wind up getting slammed in print.”
With an air of cool deliberation, he turned back to his book.
“I’m not even doing an article,” Ben said. “I’m just talking.”
“You’re big on puns, you guys.” Abel turned a page with a snap. “‘Collect Calls from the Dead.’ ‘Grave Matters.’ ‘Dead Wrong’—that one’s my favorite. ‘Abel Williams and the Big Business of Psychic Fraud,’ that was the subtitle. It was in The Atlantic, a guy named Martin Falco wrote it. Maybe he’s a friend of yours.” He glanced up. “So no offense, okay? But if it’s all right with you, I’d just as soon sit this one out.”
After a moment of pointed silence, Ben turned away. He gazed out the window, where an ashen line of distant buildings sketched itself against the gunmetal sky. Across the room Keel rattled a ball around the perimeter of a hole—Ben heard it drop at last, barreling down through the guts of the table—and as the hum of the treadmill went on and on, he recalled a gerbil he’d had when he was a kid, running the endless circuit of his exercise wheel, and he thought of the arc of his own life, drawing him inevitably back to this place, to this building, to Dreamland, scaling the heavens above his head, eighteen stories coring the leaden January sky. He thought of apartment 1824 and he thought of his own suite down the hall. He thought of his laptop waiting on the desk, its screen glimmering watchfully among the shadows, and he said, “The thing is, it’s really not okay with me.”
Something in his voice seemed to give Abel Williams pause. He folded the corner of his page and looked up, studying Ben. “You’re persistent, I’ll give you that much.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Ben said.
“Why is that, I wonder?”
Ben said nothing.
“There’s something to this, isn’t there? Something personal.”
Across the room, Keel broke a freshly racked triangle of balls.
And still, Ben said nothing.
“Funny, how you guys act when the shoe’s on the other foot, isn’t it?” Abel tilted his head to the ceiling, musing. “Automatic writing. Bogus. I think that’s the conventional wisdom.”
“I’m not asking for the conventional wisdom.”
“When it comes to automatic writing, even true believers aren’t true believers anymore.”
“Why not?”
“All that nineteenth-century crap has been pretty convincingly disproved. Cheesecloth apparitions, ectoplasm, physical mediums. It’s actually a little embarrassing, isn’t it?”
“You don’t sound much like a believer yourself,” Ben said.
“I know what I can do, that’s all. I believe in that.”
“What do you do, Abel?”
“How can I explain it? It’s like describing color to someone who’s been blind from birth. You don’t have the sensory experience you’d need to understand.” He shrugged. “It’s like I told you in the lobby the other day. I sense … energies. They have the weight of personality, they have a weight of knowing. Sometimes I he—” he said, and then he broke off abruptly.
In the moment of hesitation, as he watched a shadow flit across the other man’s face, a flicker of intuition ignited in Ben’s mind. Nothing to fire his thoughts—not yet—but it was something, anyway: a halting glow that might yet flare into the warmth of knowledge. “Sometimes you what?” he said, cautioning himself not to push too hard.
Abel Williams smiled. “See how clever you are? This isn’t about me, remember? You wanted background, that’s all. Automatic writing.”
“You already said it was bunk.”
“As proof of survival beyond death, yes.”
“But?”
“Let me give you an example: there was a nineteenth-century medium, I forget her name. But in her trance state, her spirit guide used a lot of automatic writing.”
“Her spirit guide?”
“Her ‘control’ in the afterlife.” Abel waved his hand. “Victor Hugo, at one point. A little while later, a guy named Cagliostro, a courtier at the court of Louis XVI. A little while after that Marie Antoinette herself.”
“Dead peasants just aren’t that talkative, are they?” Ben said. “Too hard to dig up the necessary facts.”
“Dead peasants would be that much harder to disprove, too, wouldn’t they?”
“Are you speaking from professional experience?”
“See, there you go again,” Abel said, but he didn’t seem to take offense. He leaned forward, setting aside his book. “This isn’t about me, remember? The point of the story is that each of the control personalities wrote a markedly different script than the medium herself did. Or each other for that matter. Spiritualists took that as evidence for survival.”
“So what happened?”
“Like I sa
id, a medium who channels the rich and famous is easy to check up on. Turns out her spirit controls made claims that violated established historical record. Plus, their handwriting didn’t match the surviving letters of the historical figures she claimed to be channeling.”
“So she was a fraud.”
“That’s where it gets complicated.”
Abel sat back, crossing his arms. In the silence, with the gloom beyond the windows deepening, Ben realized that Keel had drifted out of the room. There was no sound but the whir of the treadmill, on and on and on.
“She’s like the Energizer bunny or something,” Abel said.
“What do you mean?” Ben said.
“You know those old TV com—”
“No. The medium. ‘That’s where it gets complicated.’ What do you mean? She’s either a fraud or she’s not a fraud.”
“It’s not that simple,” Abel said. “Most mediums fall into a kind of self-induced trance, right? A disassociative state independent of memory, volition. The point is she probably believed she was in touch with the dead. The scientist who studied her on the other hand—his name was Forney or Florney, something like that—concluded that her writings were produced subconsciously.”
“Like dreams.”
“If you follow Freud’s thinking.” Abel shrugged. “Some therapists use the technique, so there’s at least some credibility to the theory.”
Ben sat back, thinking of Paul Cook.
Years after that visit to the Santa Monica library, Paul had told Ben that he had suffered a form of post-traumatic stress, that the obsessive writing was akin to the flashbacks combat veterans sometimes experienced. The horrific imagery had been a measure not of his own latent potential for violence—as Ben’s parents had feared—but of the violence that had been done him. Deal with the root trauma, the symptom would evaporate—that had been Paul’s therapeutic strategy.
It had worked, too—or so Ben had believed.
But what if there was more to it?
The writing had returned, after all—and this time its character had changed. It read less like flashbacks than warnings, harbingers of the perils that awaited him here in the place where it had all begun, here in Dreamland.
Do you believe in ghosts?
He knew what Paul Cook would say: the only ghosts are the ones inside your head. And the only way to exorcise them is to face them.
Ben looked up.
Night curtained the windows. The lights of the distant city beckoned him, he could feel their lure.
“Ben?”
He turned to Abel Williams.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Abel said. “This isn’t just random curiosity. This is personal.” Something in his tone reminded Ben of Paul—a solicitude that could hardly be resisted, an eagerness to listen that Abel’s clientele must have heard there all along.
They stared at one another in silence, a silence as deep and unplumbed as the sea. Even the sound of the treadmill had stopped.
Ben felt the pressure to unburden himself, a hard knot in his throat.
He swallowed, forcing a smile.
“What do you know?” he said. “Lara’s decided to take a rest.”
Abel smiled back coldly, and the moment slipped past. “Maybe her batteries ran down,” he said, reaching for his book.
5
Voices. Sometimes I hear voices.
That’s what Abel had been about to say to Ben. What do you do, Abel? he’d asked—a simple enough question, one Abel had heard a thousand times before, and out it came, the standard answer, fuzzy and pleasantly ecumenical, with just the slightest sheen of scientific plausibility. He could have expanded—in the past, on Larry King, on Oprah, he’d done exactly that.
Start with first principles, he might have said: the First Law of Thermodynamics, basic Newtonian physics. Energy can never be lost, it can only be transformed. What is life but energy, death but transformation?
He could have said that, he’d said it a thousand times in the past, but he hadn’t. Instead he’d almost let it slip, a truth that had never been a truth before, not until he came to this place, not until he came to Dreamland, not until he had fished that photograph from the debris in Apartment 1824 and the voice of the little girl—
—I’m here, Abel—
—had spoken in his head, so clear she might have been standing at his shoulder.
He had almost said as much to Ben Prather.
Why?
Because the voices were on his mind. They were constantly on his mind.
Because he could hear them, even now he could hear them—congeries of whispers in the faraway corners of the room, like wind sighing through tall grass, whispering, whispering, whispering. And what if, once sensitized, he could never quite tune them out again?
A thought came to him out of the air, unbidden:
There was a world and there was a fence and there was a world beyond the fence.
Memory battered at the threshold of his consciousness. Abel clutched his book with whitened knuckles and shouldered closed the door against it, skimming the words before him without any real comprehension.
He could feel the weight of Ben’s scrutiny against his skin.
What if he was going mad?
Carefully, without looking up, Abel reached up and turned the page.
6
About one thing, anyway, Abel had been wrong.
There was a battery in Lara McGovern’s heart that would never run down, no matter how often she tapped it.
She ran.
In the stillness and shadows of the declining day, in the empty gym which already smelled of sweat and iron and the thick black grease that had been used to lubricate the Nautilus machine, she ran. She ran until her tee shirt hung damp against her body and the locket dangling between her diminished breasts clung there in a viscid film of perspiration. She ran until she could smell the sharp tang of her own odor, until her body rebelled—until her aching feet recoiled from each collision with the flying belt of the treadmill and the long muscles in her thighs screamed and each breath lacerated her lungs. She ran through the pain into an all-too-momentary blur of endorphin joy and she ran through that, too, and even then the battery in her heart never gave out.
It couldn’t. From the day Katie Wright had slipped between her sleep-fumbled fingers—
—but she didn’t slip, did she, she—
—every breath, every thought, every waking instant of Lara’s life and most of the other ones, too, had been devoted to recharging it. She ran to deplete it, ran until exhaustion overtook her at last, only to wake too soon from fraught and terrifying dreams to find that battery full and pulsing in her breast.
“You’re too thin,” Dan Sutherland had told her the day he called her back to Mercy General—the day this had all begun. Escorting her through antiseptic-smelling hallways abustle with doctors and nurses who wouldn’t quite meet her eyes, through Admissions, past the ER, and into the thick August heat that clogged the streets beyond, he pressed her on the issue. “Are you eating right?” he said. “Are you getting enough sleep?”
He said, “Are you taking care of yourself?”
Lara had turned to face him, brushing a strand of limp hair out of her eyes. She stared into his lean, freckled visage as a train thundered overhead. In the percussive aftermath of its passage, she said, “Shit, Dan, would you be?”
They both knew the answer to that one.
Sutherland looked away. He rubbed his long jaw with one hand. “Well, try,” he said. “You’re a good doctor. We need you around here.”
“Obviously.”
The bitterness stung him: she could see it in the tiny muscles that tightened around his mouth.
“This thing with Ramsey Lomax. Give it some thought. You can do some good that way. If she had to die—”
—she didn’t she didn’t have to die—
“—make sure it didn’t happen for nothing.”
“Right. Thanks, that helps.”
<
br /> She started to turn away, but he reached out and took her arm. “I’m serious, Lara. These things happen. They’re terrible, but they can be forgiven.”
“You mean I can buy my way back into the hospital’s graces.”
“If that’s the way you want to look at it. All I’m saying is, give it some thought.” He squeezed her arm gently. “You’re a good doctor. You’ve worked too hard to throw it all away. So give it your serious consideration. And in the meantime, take care of yourself. You’re too damn skinny.”
“Well,” she said. “Okay, then. Thanks.”
Turning, she struck off toward the El, and though she ignored the frustrated syllables he threw at her retreating back—
“Lara!”
—over the days and weeks that followed she found herself doing everything he’d asked: thinking over Lomax’s offer and trying—that was the key word, trying—to take better care of herself. She’d had better luck on the first count than on the second. Even as she climbed the stairs to the train platform that afternoon, she’d known that in the end she would take what Lomax had to offer. Any other course was madness: buying her way back into her profession was better than giving it up forever. Better to surrender her sense of what was right and appropriate than surrender her role as a doctor—her sense of purpose and identity, her very self.
But as for taking care of herself, that was harder. Oh, she would try: not for her any of the old predictable pathways to self-immolation—drugs, booze, promiscuity. She’d seen too much of all three in the ER. She had too much self-respect to destroy herself that way.
But one could run.
There was nothing wrong with that. How many times had she said so herself, to some poor benighted soul in the ER? “You ought to consider getting some exercise, it would do you some good.”
And so she ran. She ran day after day, in the mornings through a lakeside shimmer of light, in the afternoons along the cindered track of a nearby high school. She ran for hours, she ran for miles, she ran until the flesh melted off her bones, until she could count the ribs beneath her skin, until her cheeks grew hollow and the corded muscles in her thighs stood out in sharp relief. She ran until Katie Wright’s face disappeared in a white haze of exhaustion. But no matter how hard she ran, no matter how fast, when the haze cleared, Katie Wright loomed up before her.