Part 27 (2/2)

(A voice outside of the memory, Julie's, ”Who are they? What are their names?” and it jolted her off one memory screen and onto another.) There was an isolation booth. A gla.s.sed-in cage, but with a doorway that led into a larger room that was the testing room.

(”Why is this important?” Julie asked.

”Something bad happened here,” Michael said.) Then, another memory: the older boy and three girls and one other boy stood on the stairs in the schoolhouse, blocking the way for Michael to pa.s.s.

”You can't come up,” the older boy said.

”Why not?”

”We're testing someone.”

”You're testing someone? You're not supposed to run the tests. Where's Dr. Stone?”

”Getting a taste,” one of the girls-a tall, wiry one with braces, ”of his own medicine.” She and one of the other girls giggled.

”If you know what's good for you,” the boy said, ”you'll just go back downstairs.”

Michael noticed the way the five of them had carved spirals and things on their bodies. ”Why'd you do that?” he pointed to the girl's arm.

”We're a special secret club now,” she said.

”You can't join,” the older boy said, quickly.

”Why not?”

”You're not good enough,” he said. ”You're fake. You're one of the twenty-six percenters. We don't want you. We want the ninety-nine percenters.”

Another memory screen: Michael was weeping, wiping his eyes out as he walked down the corridor, and when he came to the Sleep Room, he looked through the door window and saw something that almost made him laugh, and then it scared him.

(”What is it? What did you see?”) In each of the narrow beds, the doctors and teachers and the parapsychologist, all lying down as if sleeping, polka dots on their foreheads. Michael tried to make his mind roam into the room, but something blocked him. Why were they just lying there? What had done this?

His mind sped through possibilities-thinking of his cla.s.smates, and he knew it was the older boy. Something terrible. Something they had done: the ones who gathered at the top of the stairs. They had scrambled the minds of their teachers, of their doctors, and of Mr. Boatwright, and maybe even his own father.

They weren't dead, he was sure. Their eyes were open, and their lips seemed to open and close as if they were fish pulled from water, dying on dry land.

And then, Julie heard what sounded like an explosion and saw a little girl screaming as she tried to open the door to a gla.s.s booth-inside it was an inferno. The door finally opened, and a boy, on fire, came running out.

And then, Julie felt other things. She felt a sense of benevolence like she'd never experienced. She felt kindness. She felt something sacred. Michael's voice in her mind, ”I died, Julie. I died then. You're with me, feeling that. Don't forget it. Don't ever forget what you're feeling. It's not a terror. Death is not a terror. It is the doorway to something sacred. See, how I felt it? Stay with me. Stay with it.”

Wave after wave of elation seemed to sweep through her. ”It's the human soul,” he said, with her inside him. ”It's the human soul, inviolate. Don't ever forget that, Julie. Don't. Death is just a stop along the way.”

Then, she felt herself heave as if about to vomit, and she sucked air-but it was not her, was it? She experienced his memory-his fragments. He was alive. They stood around him, pointing. The other children.

The older boy stepped forward and whispered in the ear of the boy who had been burnt. ”You pa.s.sed the test,” he said.

It was Hut. She knew it was Hut. She could see in the boy's face that it was Hut. Hut was the older boy. Hut helped set the boy on fire. Hut was doing something evil. Something terrible as a child.

The fear rose up in her. The fear grew quickly, like a fire itself in her mind, and she felt Michael's consciousness grasp at her, trying to tug her back, but the fear shot her out of the Stream and she was once again in her front hall, her back pressed against the front door, but the flashlight had fallen to the floor.

Michael Diamond had released her hand.

”Julie,” he said, his breathing heavy. ”I did kill him. But not because of revenge. But because he was bringing things into existence. He was doing something terrible.”

She stood there, breathing heavily also. She crumbled to her knees and sat down on the cold floor.

”You murdered my husband,” she said. ”And now you come here with this. This...magic trick. To make me feel things. To make me think you're not the man who stabbed my husband. Who s.a.d.i.s.tically killed him.”

”You believe,” Michael Diamond said. ”You can't go back from that. Once you believe, you can't.”

4.

Inside her own consciousness, without the sense that Diamond was inside her, Julie felt a growing belief. She felt it more than she had ever felt anything before. His words: the human soul inviolate. Inviolate. There was something more than just this existence. She'd sensed it, she'd been exposed to it in the past, but she had never believed it because she had no direct experience. But now, here all this was. As if it were meant to come to her. As if it were falling into place for her.

And yet, he murdered Hut.

”I want more,” she said, feeling hungry. ”I want to be inside you. I want to see more. I can't live like this. I can't be like this. I can't have all these things in my head. What I've seen. What I've experienced.”

”It's unexplainable in words,” he said. ”Here, take my hand. Just take my hand. I can bring you back inside me, but there's something inside you that's still blocked, Julie. Something they blocked.”

”They?”

”There are at least five of them, still. They've done terrible things. Worse than you can imagine. If I were to tell you,” he said.

”Show me.”

5.

In the dark, he took his s.h.i.+rt off and crouched down beside her. Then, he guided her hands to his chest. ”Accept the Stream,” he said. ”I'll bring you in. I'll show you what you want.”

Soon, she felt as if she were flying into shadows. She knew from her reading that this was the astral projection that was often written about-the remote viewing, where one consciousness invaded another. And she saw the memory screens-it was like blinking, and each time a new image or moment of his life came up.

From his early life and his first experiences of Ability X (even his language invaded her mind, and she understood and accepted it) when he was seven and his father, in his military uniform, in a boardroom of some kind, tested him with cards, and then with mind games where the boy had to tell what he saw in pictures from his father's thoughts. The little boy scribbled houses and horses and cats and women and his father each time nodded, and then the boy was in a room with his little sister Margie, and more tests. And she saw the building that was the Chelsea Parapsychological Inst.i.tute, and she was there when the sleep study began, but his consciousness guided her through these screens, into other memories, after the fire. Of the hospital where he spent nearly a year, and she watched from above as skin graft procedures were done, and painful salt water treatments, and the boy in the bed howled in pain and begged his father to see his sister. Then, the roaming through the open Stream-floating down the halls of the hospital while the pain intensified for the boy in the room. Moving through windows, out into daylight, out into the world and traveling above the trees until finally, coming to a graveyard, and drifting down among the oaks like a kite falling to the ground, coming to rest on the grave of a little girl named Ca.s.sandra Diamant. His sister. More screens came up, and she blinked through them feeling as if she were swimming underwater with her eyes only half open.

<script>