Land of Echoes

2

Cree glanced up to see that a shape had materialized at the rear of the auditorium. Backlit by the ceiling lights near the entry, at this distance, it was no more than a dark silhouette: no face or features, just the outline of heavy shoulders and a large head so low above the body that it seemed the being had no neck. It loomed low behind the last row of seats like someone crouching or stooping, both menacing and disturbingly familiar.

In the instant it took to place the profile, Cree lost her train of thought. The last echoes of her words rang out over the speakers, and she wished she could somehow retrieve them and discern what she had said only an instant before.

Mason Ambrose. Here in Albuquerque. It had to be.

Sure enough, as she hesitated, another figure took up a post above the man in the wheelchair: Lupe. The ceiling spot haloed her gray hair and gave exaggerated dimension to the sockets of her eyes, her gaunt cheekbones, her thorn of a nose. Lupe, thin as a bone and as hard, not so much Ambrose's eternal personal assistant as his familiar, the sorcerer's mysterious creature companion.

Covering her surprise, Cree cleared her throat and took a sip of water from the glass on the podium.

"Excuse me!" she apologized. She scanned the nearer rows of the audience, located the earnest face of the woman who had spoken, smiled, and found her thought again. "It's hard to explain, but I've been asked that question before and I've given quite a bit of thought to how to answer it. I think I can convey the sensation to you if you'll follow along with me."

Moving to the side of the podium so that everyone could see her clearly, she raised her voice. "Put your index and middle fingers together and place them just under your right ear, where your jawbone meets the muscle that comes up the side of your neck. Got it? Now move the fingers forward, just under the jaw, until you feel them slide into the notch there. About halfway to your chin." Cree tipped her head and tossed her hair back as she demonstrated. There. Most of the audience were obligingly putting their hands to their throats, wondering where she was going with this.

"You might have to push fairly hard. But you should be able to feel your carotid artery there-a rubbery cord about as big around as a pencil? You can feel it stiffen and soften with every heartbeat."

She gave them a moment just to feel it.

"You're putting your finger right on your physical life. That throb-it's always been with you. Your heart's keeping you alive without your conscious thought-it's living inside you almost as if it's a separate creature alive in your chest. It does its job day in, day out. Most people don't like feeling it. We don't like to be reminded that there's an automatic part of ourselves, going about its business without our conscious supervision. It's a little creepy, isn't it? Vital, insistent, sort of foreign somehow? Yet of course it's deeply intimate, that pulse-deeply familiar, right?"

The audience was silent; most of them had their heads tilted, hands at throats. Some serious expressions, a few uncomfortable grins. Two hundred people feeling the secret pulsing inside.

"So, to answer your question, that's how it feels. That's how.. intimate it feels. That's how real it feels, how disconcerting it feels, to experience a ghost. Both physically and psychologically, that's the closest analogy I can come up with. That's the way experiencing a ghost reminds you of what you really are."

And if you don't like that, Mason, if that's too "spiritual" for you, she thought defiantly, screw you.

At the rear, the silhouettes of Lupe and Mason Ambrose hovered, motionless as a trompe l'oeil painted on the back wall.

The woman who had asked the question was clearly among those who were uncomfortable with touching that pulsing serpent. She nodded seriously, two fingers still held against her neck.

There was another moment of quiet, and then Dr. Zentcy, the conference's coordinator, moved from the wings and took over the microphone. He was a pleasant-faced man who struck Cree as rather too young and too informally dressed to be an academic of any kind, let alone head of the psychology department of a major university.

"And I think that should be our last question for Dr. Black today. Thank you, Lucretia, for a provocative talk, and for taking so many questions. You've given us a great deal to think about. And thank you all for coming. Dr. Black's lecture is the final event today, but I hope we'll see you all here tomorrow for the final presentations in this year's Horizons in Psychology seminar."

The wash of applause was genuine, but as the room lights came up Cree didn't feel the gratifying release of tension that typically came after she'd delivered a lecture. Mason Ambrose didn't just casually show up at conferences, and his presence disturbed her. She hadn't seen him in four years, hadn't even spoken to him in perhaps two. If he was here, he had a reason. She realized that her body had something of a Pavlovian aversion to him, derived from the two years she'd spent working and studying with him. It wasn't just his grotesque physical appearance, or that he seemed to relish the more gruesome aspects of paranormal research: Mason Ambrose liked to push you into a learning curve so steep it could give you a nosebleed.

Dr. Zentcy had turned to Cree with a puzzled, pleased frown. He tipped his head slightly toward the back of the hall and asked under his breath, "Is that… that isn't by any chance-"

"Why, yes," Cree said, pretending she hadn't noticed earlier. "Mason Ambrose. I believe it is." Internationally renowned neuropsychiatrist and expert on abnormal psychology, internationally controversial scholar of parapsychology. My mentor.

"I didn't know…" Zentcy tried, "I mean, I had no idea he was actually…"

"Still alive? Good point." Cree leaned toward him with a bogus paranoid face and whispered, "What makes you so sure he is?"

For an instant, Zentcy's eyes widened, and Cree regretted teasing him-it was an indication of her own uneasiness. Zentcy was a good guy who deserved kudos for putting Cree and her radical ideas on the agenda here. The academic world was simply not ready for the idea that ghosts were real, and that the experience of death-and living people's relationships with the dead-must be central to any theory of psychology. His open mindedness had no doubt earned him some scorn from his colleagues here at the University of New Mexico, yet he'd treated her with only respect and consideration.

"I'm kidding," she reassured him. "But I know what you mean. With Dr. Ambrose you're never quite certain. I'll introduce you, if you like." Zentcy nodded with equivocal enthusiasm.

A dozen audience members had assembled at the front of the room, waiting to speak with her: students with theoretical questions, professors with bones to pick, even a few local residents with personal tales of ghosts and hauntings. By the time the last of them left, the figures at the back of the room had vanished.

Cree left the building feeling a mix of disappointment and relief at Mason's disappearance. Why would he have taken the time to attend her talk if he didn't want to meet with her? Just playing Mr. Mysterious, she decided; she'd hear from him again before she left Albuquerque. She drove back to her hotel to find a faxed note that confirmed her hunch: Take the Sandia Peak tramway at 5:00. See you at the top. Ambrose.