Twenty-three
David came down the stairs at midnight and sat on the
bottom step. John looked around from his seat at the darkened computer.
"You should be in bed."
"I can't sleep. What are you going to do?"
About alien mirrors and the people it had swallowed?
Moment by moment, he postponed doing anything. He feared what he'd find
either way, either a genuine alien artifact out on the slope, or nothing
at all. With David's sanity at risk, which would be worse?
"Mom says she's taking a big chance with you. She
says adults aren't as flexible as children. We don't have so much to lose
when all the rules change."
"What's the risk, may I ask?"
“She says you may make it impossible for her to do
what has to be done. I don’t know what she means by that, but she says
you should ask her your questions, or Joyce, any of the others, rather
than just sit around and run yourself in circles inside your won head.”
John glanced at the boy. "David, do you remember
when you said you thought maybe I should go to Gene for help?"
"Mother said Gene won't find anything. The mirror
won't let him see it. Besides, it's Doctor Varley you're thinking about,
not Gene, because you don't think it's real to begin with.”
"That's a lot of power you're talking about, son, the
ability to make people hallucinate."
"I know, and she's good at it."
John braced himself for the inevitable. "So what do
I do if I want to talk to Mom?"
"Just go outside on the slope when you're ready.
Don't go near the trees, though. Mom promised me you won't have to
see the mirror right away, but she say you'll want to see it after you
understand what it does."
"You don't trust her."
David fought an inner battle and lost. "No.
She's not really Mom. I don't know what she is."
John gestured with a nod. "Go to bed. I'll take it
from here."
David rose to his feet and labored his way back up
the stairs. Floorboards creaked overhead. David's bedroom door clicked
shut.
John reached for the bottle hidden alongside his
desk. He told himself it was only to dull the pain in his right hand.
Two hours later, he hadn't take more than a few slugs. David's mirror was
something that needed to be dealt with. He couldn’t hope to hide from it.
He went upstairs to the back door to check on the
night outside and discovered that it was raining. Despite the cool
breeze, he left the door open and pulled a kitchen chair around to face
the darkness. He sat and watched the overflow of water from the porch
gutter sparkle in the yard light. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The
night smelled alive.
What would he give to see Marlene again, even if it
was just a hallucination, a product of his own imagination? David had
become quickly addicted, if he could accept the boy's story at face
value. Whether David's hallucinations were a trick of some outside agency
or of his own hurting mind was still to be determined, he kept reminding
himself.
Except that in that case, he still had the clothing,
a story beyond the capability of a ten-year-old mind to fabricate, and
several missing people to explain.
The rain let off just before dawn. The first light
of day peeked beneath the cloud layer from a clear horizon.
He checked on David and found the boy sleeping
profoundly and not about to awaken anytime soon. He decided not to try.
If David's ghosts existed, he would deal with them on his own. In either
case, he would need time alone to adapt to what he found and decide his
next course of action.
He went out the back way, closed the door behind him,
and suffered a peculiar bout of agoraphobia. The slope yawned before him,
shrouded in mist and mystery. The fear was the same he had experienced
going into combat for the first time, not with the United States Marines,
but with the Israeli undercover organization who had employed him
afterwards.
"Damn," he muttered in surprise and tried hard to
pull himself together. He started off into the open holding fast to the
conviction that he would find nothing but trees and weeds in the morning's
fog. Once freed of David's paranoia, he would phone Dr. Varley and let a
professional take a crack at David and his alien visitors.
A cold, wet wind blew in from
the ocean twenty miles to the west. It whipped off the crest of
Spruce Valley like pale smoke from a grass fire and hid the forest in the
valley from view. Sunlight caught edges of the arcing mist and set
it to glowing in incandescent pink.
The wet grass soaked the bottom
of his pants legs and his socks. He walked until the towering stand
of trees appeared to view, then paused to search for the strange birds he
had seen wheeling over the slope. He saw nothing.
It was pointless to proceed further. Surrounded by
the utter peacefulness of nature, he felt foolish. Maybe it was age
creeping up on him to be so gullible, or his desperation to believe his
son mentally, if not physically, sound.
He turned away dejectedly and started back toward the
house. If he hurried, he could phone Dr. Varley and speak to the man
while David slept.
A girl in a pink dress blocked his way. John
stopped. She stood far enough away to pose no immediate physical threat.
His breath caught in his throat regardless. His heart palpitated, and
terror boiled up from the psychic depths of himself.
He worked furiously to rationalize the madness away.
So what if it was the girl? So what if she had been lost and wandering
the slopes for two days? Maybe she had run away from home and the boys
had been helping her by concocting their story of an alien visitor.
"Jackie Kahl?"
The emptiness swallowed the sound of his voice.
Jackie Kahl clasped her hands behind her back and
rocked to and fro. "Hi, Mr. Hartman!"
John had never met the girl in his life. Had it not
been for the dress, he would not have guessed her identity. But if the
blood-stained pink dress had been found discarded in his trash barrel, how
could she be wearing it? And how did she know his name?
The hawk swept out of the cloudy sky and alighted on
her shoulder. Starlings fluttered from the stand of trees and began to
circle overhead. The ground before her seethed with insect and small
animal life not visible an instant before. All of these things had
been part of David's story.
He had stood at the threshold of death once or twice
in his past life. He felt the same strangely passive sense of acceptance
he had felt then. His senses were open to the world, his
mind and body ready to fall back on old, deeply ingrained skills, whether
to fight or to turn and run.
A mouse rushed up to his feet and rose on its back
legs, a deliberate sacrifice to his curiosity. John squatted, reached for
a twig, and carefully extended it toward the rodent. The stick passed
through the image. In the next instant, the mouse and the crawling carpet
of insect life vanished. The hawk spread its wings and flew away and
began to circle the stand of trees with the other birds.
"I like the birds especially," Jackie called to him.
"They love to fly, and they have such a beautiful view of the world."
Angel appeared further down the slope, her upper body
wrapped in her mink stole, her long legs beneath her leather miniskirt
bare to the cold dawn.
And Joyce Blair?
"I'm here, too, John."
John whirled about. She stood twenty feet away,
dressed in the same green dress David had hidden beneath his bed. She
looked so real that the deeper and more primitive levels of his mind were
completely fooled.
Joyce gave a curt nod off to one side. "Julian
Ackorage is with us as well."
John only glanced at the man standing off by himself
at a distance. He waited for an explanation of the gathering. Joyce
turned away. "Follow me. I'll show you David's mirror."
"David asked that I stay away from the mirror."
"Could your son's caution save you, were our intent
hostile?"
John followed her to the trees without further
argument. Joyce stepped to one side of a path of broken vegetation
leading into the underbrush. He went in alone. Forewarned of the device,
he stopped when he saw swiftly passing clouds reflected in an irregular
patch of ground.
A small and well-trained part of his mind remained
separated from his emotional confusion and protest. He kicked dirt onto
the mirror's surface and watched it slide and come to a stop. He snatched
a green leafy-looking grasshopper from a nearby stalk, tossed it down and
watched it vanish without a trace into the transparent surface. It was
just as David had said.
Which brought his thoughts back to Marlene, now that
he knew for certain that David had spoken the truth. If she appeared to
him, even knowing she would only be a simulation, he would panic. He
would go to pieces and be of use to no one. He was on the brink
regardless.
He backed slowly from the underbrush. His
mind-destroying dread intensified, and enveloped him, and began to
squeeze.
"We can make her more real than you can possibly
imagine," Joyce said quietly. "In David's mind, it is as if she had never
died. One part of his mind knows the truth. The most important part
simply feels the immediate reality."
John started back toward the house. "Deceit," he
murmured, keeping his face averted from Joyce's image.
She held her ground as he moved
away, but her voice carried
effortlessly. "Nature is full of deceit, John. Deceit is a tool, like
pain and pleasure. Deceit is nature's way of controlling the conscious
mind when it is in our best interest to be controlled."
John paused without looking back. Even staring
madness in its face, his curiosity was overpowering. "Is that what you
are? A trick of nature?"
"We are all one with nature, John."
"You're some kind of machine," John ventured,
thinking that the pool of reflectivity in the trees couldn't be thought of
as an organism.
"We are consciousness, John. We have been altered
and reorganized only to the extent necessary to serve its purpose. David
thought of the mirror as a butterfly net. We are the specimens it has
taken. We remain ourselves, but we are also one, and we have a new
allegiance."
John looked to Julian Ackorage standing in the
distance. "And that bastard? Do you have any idea of what that man did?"
"We remember what he did, and we understand why."
John pointed to Jackie Kahl. "She knows? That
innocent child?"
Joyce took a moment to respond. "The mirror has its
own agenda. It only wants to grow and to learn."
John shook his head frantically. "Anyone in their
right mind would go insane. You couldn't survive what's been done to you,
if you're Joyce Blair at all."
Joyce came closer, and it was true that a part of his
mind could not disbelieve what he was seeing.
"John, I'm still me. The changes are all for the
better. In sharing Julian Ackorage's life, don't you think I understand
Roy better? I saw only his hate, none of his fear and the love he
had never been taught to express. Do you think Julian's
terrible anger toward innocence has survived knowledge of the abuse Jackie
has suffered at the hands of an uncaring father? Does the child remain ignorant of adult ways sharing her
world with Angel? We all agree that we have gained far more than we have
lost.”
John could accept all of that.
He moved on. "A butterfly net, you said. Wielded by whom? For
what purpose?"
"We know only of one purpose, John. You have become
part of that purpose. You and David."
John took a step backward, sensing strongly that he
and David were in danger. He stood upon a battleground unfamiliar to
him.
But he could not hope to ever surrender. "You can
never expect me to cooperate with you," he said quietly.
"We can give you Marlene in exchange for your
cooperation."
"My wife is dead."
"Your memory of her is very much alive."
"I'd make a fool of myself falling prey to your
chicanery, and you'd make a mockery of the memory of my wife attempting to
deceive me!”
"John, there's more to this than you can understand.
You must be patient with us. Whatever you do, please do not fear us. We
will not harm you."
John had nothing more to say to her. He turned and
jogged toward the house.
Her image receded behind him, but not her voice.
"We will not force ourselves upon you, John."
He swung around to call out to her one last time.
"And you'll not convince me that you can give me my
wife back! That child and that sick bastard and that pathetic whore knows
nothing of what it means to be a wife, or a mother! You know nothing of
human loss and suffering!"
"John," she said softly. "We must."
Joyce Blair vanished. One by one, the other figures
standing scattered about the slope winked out of existence. Overhead, the
hawk cried angrily and swooped low to the ground, and then back up, almost
out of sight, pirouetting through the morning skies.
