Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  “Signed on to what?”

  “Just watch already.” She nodded toward the jar and backed away.

  Several minutes later, the music still pulsing, everyone apparently in place, the sand in the jar started to vibrate. The volume of the trance music started decreasing, slowly, though the air felt full of the vibration of whatever caused the sand to jump around.

  “Never fails.” The Twin behind her spoke into her ear. Hot breath. Natalie was definitely starting to feel uncomfortable about the woman behind her, but not enough to leave just yet.

  As the music volume dropped off completely, the vibration in the jar increased sharply. The black, granular material under the bell jar danced and vibrated and climbed the copper rod in swirls and spiky rings. Natalie looked back to the woman running the trance or whatever occult trick was underway. She stared intently but not with intensity or a feeling of stress, it seemed to Natalie. Just, calmly looking at the jar with confidence. Thin filaments of blue and white electric strands or plasma played on the plating across the tall woman’s vest, upper arms and neck.

  Natalie backed up and glanced around. Was it a trick of the light? Was the plasma-light on her, too? The Soccer Twin behind her gripped Natalie’s arms and turned her back toward the middle.

  “Don’t worry,” the woman said quickly and released her. “It’s harmless. The light just helps them focus.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll tell you what you need to know now, but you have to stop asking me questions.”

  Natalie stepped forward to get space. She felt vulnerable. She reached to touch her notebook for assurance, but touched the Soccer Twin’s front by accident. Before she could react more than jerking her hand forward, the vibration in the air around her dissipated, flowing out from around them toward the bell jar, like a wind of silent noise. The sand quickly gathered into a mushroom cloud at the top of the rod, looking a lot like the shape of the leader’s hair. She twisted her head back to the woman leading the trance and saw the plasma filaments begin dancing out from her, off of her, toward the first line of kids in front and next to her. The woman tensed, as if in the throws of emotion, pain or pleasure, the veins in her arms and neck stood out. The men and women hit by the filaments, lines of plasma arching from neck gem to neck gem, began to sway slightly then increasingly as the filaments pulsed from neck to neck. The Twin in front of her swayed too, though no electric filament had attached itself to her, rather it danced around her to the the person on her left, diagonal to Natalie. When the filament hit each person, they closed their eyes. Their faces relaxed, like they’d just been hit with a drug. A second later, the recipient opened her eyes and the filaments moved to the next four, the ones in back and the ones next to her. Each person had the same reaction. The electricity spread fast after that, like a wave racing over them. The woman behind her stepped against her. Natalie stepped closer to the woman in front. The pressure against her didn’t feel threatening, however. She saw that everyone with the filaments lacing between their necks moved closer to each other. And, well, she told herself, we still have our clothes on. Finally the filaments connected with the last two people closest to the bell jar and jumped the gap between them and the top of the jar. The filaments danced, pulses zapped at the jar but did not go through the glass.

  Hell of a light trick, Natalie assessed.

  The sand shimmied through a complex series of waves, spikes and globes at the top, refining in such a varied degree that some of the motion when it melted into the more general form, created substructures within the mass, like one of those intricately carved ivory balls with spheres encompassing slightly smaller spheres. Fascinated, Natalie’s anxiety fell away. She felt the vibration pulsing the sand coming back through the people, through her too, though apparently less intensely, then back to the woman sitting at the front of the passage between everyone. Natalie felt it as a kind of hum in her body, mostly centered in the mass of her stomach. Then The Twins pressed her firmly between them. The one behind pushed hard against her back, pushing her hard against the back of the one in front of her. The motion between them had stopped, no grinding. Just hard pressed between them. She didn’t care, like her inhibitions had dissolved. She wanted them pressed against her. The harder they pressed, the stronger the pulsing of the air, warm and centered below her stomach, became. The lights or plasma filaments grew thick as ropes floating in the air around her, but did not touch her. The patterns in the sand structures became much more complex with parts connected to other parts, like images she’d seen of connected neurons. The vibration and hum entranced her more as the shape-shifting black sand became more and more agitated. Natalie told herself, as if from a distance to herself, to look at the leader. The woman sat up straight in the chair, hands on her thighs still, enveloped in a complex spiderweb of plasma filaments. The lights in her necklaces burned bright. Her eyes like bulbs pouring out dark energy. Natalie felt a tug on the line of people pressed against her. She looked back at the jar as the sand particles raced up and out of the knob at the top and began to crawl up the electric filaments into each dancer’s collar.

  The sand reached every neck and the vibration started to grow disorganized in her, leaving her body cold and naked feeling, the hum growing more like static. She became more aware of the outline of the bodies behind and in front of her. Her own form. She glanced back at the woman leading the trance. Right at that moment, or maybe it had been happening at intervals before and Natalie just hadn’t noticed, the blue lights in her collar flickered out. They went black, not a color black, more like they became holes. The lights in the collars of the dancers all went black at the same time. All of the next three things happened at the same instant: The music kicked in, louder and faster. The plasma and the sand threads shattered. The particles dropped to the bottom of the jar and the plasma strings vaporized. The black particles also fell to the floor around her. The Twins pushed against her, forward and backward, but the feeling was gone. Natalie felt sober, embarrassed. She didn’t move with the music like all the others, who began grinding with intent. She slid from between the two women, looked back in the direction of the leader, but the chair was empty. She took out her notebook and tried to get the attention of anyone around her to ask who they were, why were they there, but no one so much as shook a no at her. She bent down, pinched up some of the black sand and rubbed it into the notebook paper and basically climbed over bodies on her way to the stairs. Two steps up, she looked back over the mass of dancers, who were quickly loosing clothes. The Soccer Twins had left the floor, too.

  At the top of the steps, she opened the door a crack to see if she could hear anyone. Nothing. The kitchen was empty. She stepped onto the main floor and looked around. The bedrooms were empty, too. She rushed to the front door and outside to catch the Twins and the leader before they could drive away, but the car was there with no one around. She trotted around the house to find where they could have left the basement, but the windows would have been tough to get out of and the basement didn’t have a door. They still had to be inside, but she couldn’t imagine a room in the open basement big enough to hold all three. Why would they do that? She’d seen what she’d seen, and it was not like they were doing anything illegal, though she suspected those kids’ mothers would have been quite shocked. She thought about a photo suddenly, just sneak back in. But, one, she didn’t want to go back in. And, two, what would she ever do with the photo except get in more trouble. Not like she was going to show it to Adam, let alone publish it.

  She trotted back to the autocar and filled the rest of her notebook with sketched scenes. Then she let the car drive her back to her apartment, deciding to work through her bafflement and slight embarrassment at her own enjoyment of part of the trance, as she took to calling it, by writing a very professional account of the evening in her notes to Adam.

  VII

  Adam pushed his reporters to become unconscious of what they were writing when writing the first drafts of a story no one knew
the actual point of. Pure stream-of-consciousness stuff right out of the 1970s was the best way to get a story-defining sentence. Natalie took to this style of writing with the aplomb of the Stream Generation who time and again mistook stream of consciousness for writing. So her stories proved difficult to rein in, her daily road to Damascus. He had considered barring her from the practice after her first few months at the paper, mostly because she kept sending her rejected story notes to his boss with the pedantic foolishness of instructing Beach on how the re-invigorated world of blog-writing called for these free-form, "plain language" ramblings and that he was holding her back. What he hated most about this exchange was that Beach teased him mercilessly in front of the other editors about how his reporter kept leaping over him to make a case for publishing her notes!

  He had threatened to outright fire her if she sent one more fucking note to Beach. But, he allowed her to continued the stream-of-consciousness practice.

  So, when he got to his desk after cigarettes and the morning gab-sessions throughout the newsroom and opened Natalie's story-notes file, he was not surprised, during his preliminary scroll, to find that she’d filed an especially long note. After all, she’d earned a lawyer consultation and would now display that feather-in-her-cap whenever told to shut up and sit down. He reclined in his chair, put a cup of coffee on the mound of his belly and began to read:

  I know what you’re going to say and I agree, damn stupid of me not to have taken a video or at least a photo or audio recording and I will next time. I’m not sure I could have gotten away with it anyway. “Smoke and mirrors,” as you like to say. Indoctrination. I don’t know. Maybe just a cult after all. I know you will read this in a rush and roll your eyes. But this is the best writing I have ever done and you should publish it as a reporter’s notebook.

  And roll his eyes he did.

  By the end of her account, Adam felt a different concern about his reporter. She was racing headlong into some pretty engaging material and looked to be pretty close to losing objectivity. If he didn’t get ahead of her on this story, he might lose her to it and all the good material she’d gathered could go to waste.

  He looked again at his desk phone. The message light was dark. Checked his cellphone. Nothing. So, no one had called to complain about Natalie’s presence at the party. They were in the clear, for now, on that front. Of course, he would not, could not now even if he wanted to, publish her notes. So that was one less fight he would have to have. He and Beach hadn’t even met with the paper’s lawyers. Mainly, though, her journal entry only raised a lot of unanswered questions. Not only what were the partygoers doing, but was that what Mannerheim wanted from them? Was he there to exercise his libido? If he was, why would a federal judge step in with a prior restraint order just to protect a lecher from some bad press? It didn’t make any sense to begin with and now, after what he had just read, the prior restraint made even less sense.

  He finger-punched “esc,” closing the notes window. He felt irrationally desperate. A chemical mood thing. His blood pressure probably soaring again. He got out of the chair, grabbed his coat and left the building. If he had still been allowed to drink heavily during the day, this would have been a great time for it. But he didn’t drink heavily in the early evenings anymore, not as often anyway. His liver had become the size of a rather large and fatty pot roast. He was allowed five or six cigarettes for the day, since his lungs were still clear.

  Adam went to the glass door that opened onto a balcony, zipped his coat against the cold air coming off the close-by Puget Sound, silvery wavelets lapped onto the sliver of glowing sand beneath the big black rocks. It was a clear evening and cold. The Olympic Mountains met the night sky, aglow from the city lights, in a jagged outline. Peaks still topped with snow. The beach below smelled of seaweed and salt water, but thankfully not like something dead, like thirty years ago when he was a morning general assignment reporter and had stepped out for a smoke and smelled that dead girl. Fifteen years old and wouldn’t get any older. She had been in the water for several days until the tether came undone from her ankle. He shivered. No one every found out who she was or why she’d been dumped, dead before she hit the water the coroner said. Memories haunt him like chickens, he complained. They’re always pecking at the surface of consciousness. Now and then one pecks through. He lit a second cigarette.

  He moved on to mull over the question, Why Mannerheim? Just those two words. Encoded in them were broader questions. Why there? Why them? Why now?

  No doubt a lot went on everywhere in the world that he had no inkling of or could even guess at, but something or someone bigger than Mannerheim, more important than whatever this wealthy geek was playing at, had stepped out of the shadows. That motive, that reason had swept the judge up as it washed onto the shores of the Daily-Record. So, if not Mannerheim, then who or what did Natalie see, hear or get noticed by that triggered this tsunami? The only other people in the photos were the women. That this whole parade of absurdities hinged on them made even less sense.

  He flicked the cigarette over the railing and went back in to finish the day and Robert’s story, which was heading for the top of A1, feeling lucky that he wasn’t drunk or even drinking. Positive reinforcement had persuaded him as much as his health to stop drinking daily, morning, noon and night. The dread he felt when he was drunk and stumbling into his lonely bed had become worse than he felt being sober.

  VIII

  Morning and reporters, photographers, a phalanx of editors ambled around and grouped into chat-circles … heckling the latest ball player who failed, marshaling outrage at the nation’s leaders, marveling at the latest drunk-dude stabbing or mayoral rumor. The televisions and police scanners filled in the conversation gaps. Ah, how Adam loved the sound of the newsroom in the morning. Nothing in Seattle got revved up much before noon, anyway. He avoided conversation with nods and winks as he made his way past the clusters. He had a plan to execute before Beach got in. He tossed his coat onto the pile of papers on his desk and picked up the phone handset as he plunged into the chair. He let the receiver hum its open-line song while pushing business cards, stickies and torn papers around until he found David Robbins’ private cell number.

  “Hello!” Sharp and busy, but ready to talk if you’ve got something he needs.

  “Robbins?”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “Adam Howard, Daily-Record.”

  “Ahhh. Hold on a second.”

  Adam heard him walk through his office, pretty damn big office, across a creaking wood floor. It was one of those high-ceiling, red-brick offices in Pioneer Square. The door clipped shut.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I want to talk about...”

  “You know I can’t say anything. I’m restricted by that order the same as you are.”

  “Just a ...”

  “We’ve got to be off the record. Way off the record.”

  He wanted to talk pretty darn bad if he bit that fast, which calmed Adam down.

  “Fine. Off the record for just the current purpose of, and hear me on this for christ’s sake, setting up a meeting with Mannerheim. I don’t want to hear later that I tricked you or lied to you.”

  “Off the record, I can’t set up a meeting with Mannerheim. That would pretty much cut straight across both the letter of the order and the intent of the goddamned thing.”

  “We’re both in a pickle, and that order is just the tip of the iceberg because …”

  “Why do you reporters always say the word pickle? What the hell year is it anyway …”

  “I know this isn’t about Mannerheim and if he talks with me, when this shit all hits the fan, you’ll have what it takes to keep him from taking the fall for whoever or whatever is all worked up about those harmless photographs we took. And we say pickle because sometimes a long, roughly cylindrical object soaked in briny dill is an apt metaphor for the current situation.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Off the record.�
�� He hung up.

  IX

  Adam walked under an umbrella toward Volunteer Park, eight blocks. Weather patterns had changed such that Seattle now experience real downpours rather than swirling mist and so the city that hated umbrellas now bloomed with them, mostly black, up and down its sidewalks. Mannerheim had agreed to meet at the Water Tower in the Capitol Hill park, so Adam had swung by his condo for a bite and a glass of wine, which quickly became four. So, he was full and grumpy and disappointed in himself when he got to the base of the tower. He was wet from his thighs down, no matter the umbrella. Mannerheim said he’d be at the top of the tower. Adam grumbled as he looked up the steep metal stairs, dank and wet and climbing into the vague gloom. The setting made him worry that Mannerheim had lost his mind or something. Wouldn’t be the first Seattle genius to go nuts. The wine, however, had started to settled in rather nicely. A tasty little red. He sauntered up to the steps. He’d gone way out on a limb arranging this meeting. That court order was bullshit, but contempt of court wasn’t. If anyone found out about it, well he wouldn’t be the first editor quietly sent home with no explanation. Starting up the narrow stairs curved between the massive metal water tank, zippered with rivets, and the outside brick wall, Adam wondered that more people weren’t killed here. He lowered and collapsed the umbrella. His eyes adjusted and made out the figure of a man about halfway to the top.

  “Mannerheim?” He called up through the echo zone.

  “Yes.” Mannerheim sighed the word.

  He climbed to the landing and took the proffered hand. Mannerheim’s face was thin and small for his head, pinched. His skin looked more creased and slack than in Natalie’s photos. Rough couple of days, maybe.

  “Adam Howard. Seattle Daily-Record.” He paused to judge the response. Nervous? Dismissive? “We are off the record for the moment.”