Land of Echoes

20

By the time they'd made it back to the corral and cared for the horses, it was nearing sunset. Cree's head was throbbing, and she knew she was too exhausted to try another session with Tommy right away. She absolutely had to be clearheaded and strong enough to take a peek inside his skull. Anyway, Lynn had left a note, letting her know that she'd taken him for a walk and then planned to go to the cafeteria for some dinner.

Cree seized the moment of comparative calm. She felt herself spiraling in on her bed, drawn irresistibly into its field of gravity, but first there was some business to attend to. Ten minutes on the phone, then a nap. She'd spend time with Tommy later in the evening.

It was late Saturday afternoon in Seattle, a good time to catch Joyce and Edgar before the evening's entertainments took them out for the night. She commandeered the phone in Lynn's office to make the calls.

When Ed answered, she could barely hear his hello over the stereo blasting in the background: the Gypsy Kings, belting out songs of unrequited passion.

Ed quickly brought the volume down. "Hey, Cree. Good timing. I was about to go out."

"I can call back later if-"

"No, this is fine. I won't be home later-going out to dinner. Now I'm just going to run some errands. What's up?"

"What're you going to bring, Ed?"

"Hm. Sounds like you have some recommendations."

"The lights flickered last time. Did I tell you? Very pronounced flicker phenomenon."

"So we'll need to rule out electrical system problems. I'll bring the kit for that, no problem there. But-"

"Yeah. We're getting into some EVP possibilities. Then there's the DNS issue."

It felt good to speak in the private vernacular they shared, to talk with someone who didn't need explanations or justifications. Nice to pretend there was any kind of conceptual map to this territory. But the idea brought them both up short as they thought it through.

EVP stood for electronic voice phenomena, a paranormal manifestation that had become evident only in the age of electronic media. In some cases, voices or sounds not audible to the human ear could be picked up by electronic recording equipment placed in haunted environments. Rarer still, telephones or radios sometimes produced sounds without a discernible signal source. The implication was that some unknown energies or entities were directly affecting the wires and chips and magnetic media of electronic equipment, creating patterns of electricity that ultimately emerged as audible noises or voices. Because it was an easily faked medium, Ed had been highly skeptical of EVP evidence until, despite every safeguard against hoax or error, he'd recorded a voice in an abandoned house in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

EVP was all the more complex because it tied in with a whole body of paranormal theory called DNS, direct neural stimulus. The idea here was that the energies of paranormal entities might create only the experience of images, sounds, or sensations: They didn't actually create light, vibrations in the air, or tangible bodily contact but directly activated the human brain and nervous system. Someone witnessing a phantom figure might not actually be seeing-receiving light through her eyes, which a camera would also record-at all. Rather, she might be having her optic nerve or visual cortex directly stimulated by some other form of energy.

The DNS concept helped explain the difficulty of providing a physical record of a ghost's presence. It particularly appealed to Cree because it supported her conviction that ghosts were linked to witnesses and manifested only within particular psychosocial environments: People experienced ghosts when their mental and emotional states created neurological conditions that sensitized them to the emanations of noncorporeal entities.

In the case of the flicker phenomenon, the well-documented pulsing of lights in the vicinity of paranormal events could be related to either EVP or DNS. Some form of energy could be affecting the wiring of a house or the filaments of a lightbulb and cause currents to fluctuate. Or it could affect the soft, wet wiring of the brain, causing the visual sensing circuits to misbehave. Subjectively, the end result would be indistinguishable to a witness.

"So, for the DNS, you're thinking functional microelectroencephalogram?" Ed suggested.

FMEEG was a medical technology that monitored tiny variations in the brain's electrical activity. Beyond its use in detecting brain impairment or seizure activity, FMEEG could be used to map normal brain function, allowing researchers to watch which areas lit up when the subject felt a particular emotion or responded to a particular stimulus. It had several advantages over functional MRI, one of them being that the scalp-wiring harness was light and minimally intrusive, and could easily be employed at the sites of hauntings.

"Think you can get the stuff?"

"On a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning? What're the odds, Cree? Shit."

"Call Frank. Tell him we need the gear for a week, we'll Air Express it back if we have to."

"Yeah." Ed paused, no doubt jotting a note to call their skeptical but helpful friend Frank Markowitz. Frank worked at Cascades Neurological Research Institute, coordinating multisite research initiatives with other labs and clinics. He was occasionally willing to bend the definition of "lab" enough to rent equipment to PRA.

"Okay," Ed said. "So. Otherwise. How's it going? You sound, um, good-decisive. In charge, um-"

"Bossy?"

"Well, I wasn't going to-"

"Julieta McCarty has an assertive side, okay? It's her get-things-done mode."

"So, what's the other side?"

"I'm okay, Ed," she said defensively. The other side is grief and sorrow, she thought, fear and self-doubt. Spinning out of control into anger and regret and making huge mistakes by acting upon those feelings. If only it were possible to screen out which aspects of a personality you absorbed. But of course it wasn't.

She repressed the urge to ask him where he was going tonight, wondering inappropriately if he was dating someone, at last moving past his attachment to Cree Black and her indecisions and complications. But she just thanked him. He urged her to take good care of herself, and they said good-bye.

After she hung up, Cree was left recalling the first time she'd heard the EVP recording Ed had made in Gloucester. They'd listened to it together in his tech studio in Seattle, and it had left them both badly shaken. Emerging from a mist of electronic noise, barely more coherent than static and hum, a plaintive human voice Jenny? Jen? Where are you? I'm so sorry. You must believe me. Where are you, Jenny?

Some person or fragment of a person, lost in a timeless electronic ether, searching for a companion and a world it once knew, unaware that neither existed anymore.

She would never forget the anguish of fear and sympathy she'd felt as she listened to it. In a way, it was far more frightening than the direct encounters she'd had. The fear was not one of danger in any ordinary sense-that the ghost could hurt you. It came from understanding with stark clarity how lost and alone that being was, and wondering, Is that what will happen to me?

She quickly packed the thought away, picked up the phone again, and pecked in Joyce's number. Busy.

Thinking to kill a few minutes and try again, she went back to the ward room to finally begin reading the materials Mason had provided her. This time she went straight to some of the older source material. She read it in fascinated horror.

She was struck by how many of Tommy's symptoms resembled the typical case: the intensifying cycles followed by relative normalcy, the convulsions and contortions. The often-reported breathing problems, she saw now, could easily result from the asynchronous breathing they'd observed in Tommy-obviously, the intruder and the host vying for control of basic bodily functions. A chilling idea.

On the bright side, she consoled herself, at least he ain't vomiting up toads and broken glass.

But reading on, she discovered another typical aspect of possession that struck her as particularly relevant and disturbing. Even discounting most incidents as cases of what was now called hysteria, epilepsy, or schizophrenia, this was a well-documented phenomenon that had been observed well into the age of rational medicine, right into present-day cases of dissociative identity disorder.

Possession could spread. It was catching.

In fact, most historical incidents of possession weren't confined to single individuals; the records showed dozens of "epidemics" of possession. In 1656, almost the whole community of Paderborn was "taken," but more often the contagion spread in contained populations like hospitals, orphanages, schools, and convents. Groups of nuns seemed particularly susceptible: 1491 in Cambrai, 1526 in Lyons, 1554 in Rome, on and on, with the 1634 episode in Loudon being perhaps the most famous.

After nuns, children were the most likely to get possessed in large numbers. Rome, 1555, eighty children at an orphanage; Amsterdam, 1566, thirty boys in a hospital; 1744, a group of young girls in Landes. In a famous American incident, the Goodwin children, the problem began with the eldest daughter and spread to the other three siblings: They went into fits, had convulsions, and contorted their bodies so that their spines, shoulder blades, elbows, wrists, and other joints appeared impossibly deformed.

The mechanisms of "contagion" might be responsible for the apparent paralysis of the other boys in Tommy's dorm, and the limb-locked, shivering horses. Cree had felt it herself: that stunning, numbing force around Tommy during his extreme moments.

Then there were the reports of the victim hurting himself, or attempting suicide. Was that something they had to worry about with Tommy?

Feeling overwhelmed, she pulled out of a particularly grisly case history and leafed through the remainder of the stack. There was a lot more here deserving close review; of particular interest were Mason's own studies and others that drew parallels between possession and multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder. She really should read these, and the sooner the better.

But not now, she decided. She glanced at her watch and was startled to see the time: She'd planned to give Joyce a few minutes to get off the line, and here it had been over half an hour. She put the papers aside, went back to the nurse's office, and dialed. This time it rang.

"Cree! Thank Gawd you called!"

"Oh?"

"I have no idea what you're supposed to wear down there. I mean, what? Cowboy outfits? I haven't got a thing."

Cree chuckled. It was nice to hear Joyce's Long Island accent and improbable husky contralto, and her spirit rallied considerably. "No cowboy outfits. Your usual will do. If you want to walk around or ride the horses, you'll need jeans, a sweater, and hiking boots. And a good coat-it's freezing at night. But definitely no cowboy outfits. Please!"

"Too bad." Joyce laughed. "So what's up?"

"Any chance you can do some preliminary research tomorrow, before your flight?"

"Not tonight? How very considerate of you."

"I assumed you were going out."

Joyce sighed with patient exasperation. "You have this impression of me as such a swinger. What, I was going down to Linda's Bar and boogie? For your information, I was planning on calling my mom back east and then watching a video."

"Oh, yeah? What kind of video? With whom?"

"Tell me about the research, Cree. I've already worked up a brief on recent cases of possession for you. There's no shortage- you'll see, there was a real wild one in New Jersey just last year. What else you need?"

Cree enumerated the avenues that had suggested themselves: "McCarty Energy, a coal-mining company that's big in the region. Especially Garrett McCarty, the former owner, who died in 1999 at their Hunters Point mine."

"Aha. Think he's our entity?"

"Could be. Too soon, though, I'm just curious. While you're at it, I wouldn't mind some material on his son, Donny McCarty, current CEO. Education, marital status, legal stuff, whatever's come up in the newspapers. Then, let's see… bring me that Wilkins study on multiple personality disorder and anything else you can grab on the subject. You'll need to search for dissociative identity disorder, that's the current DSM classification. Mason gave me some materials, but I want to know more about the neurological mechanisms of identity disorders, see if there're any parallels, anything we can apply to possession."

"Smart cookie!"

"Also, some regional history, especially about Navajo culture. History, mysticism, contemporary social issues. I'm especially interested in Navajo witches-the Skinwalkers, the Navajo Wolves."

"Right out of Tony Hillerman, huh? This is a pretty rich mix, Cree. I'm leavin' on a jet plane, right, in twenty-one hours-"

"Oh, and one more-livestock mutilations."

Joyce made a shuddering noise. "Now that stuff completely and totally grosses me out. Seriously. So, what-they've been having them? At the school?"

"I don't think there's any connection. Actually, I don't know what I think about mutes, I just-"

"'Mutes'?"

"Local term. Listen, there's likely to be a ton on the Web, gotta really weed out the idiots on this one."

" 'Mutes'!" Joyce said again. "Isn't it supposed to be a UFO thing? Little green men I'm fine with, but little green vivisectionists? Brrrrr! You know?" While she paused to make notes, Cree distinctly heard the sound of the doorbell ringing in her Seattle apartment, and Joyce said quickly, "Well, okay. That's it, then, right? Gotta go. Gotta call Mom and get to work on this. See you tomorrow night, yeah? Take care. Bye-byee."

One last call, she told herself-this one for pleasure, not for business. It would be good to talk to Paul, to remind herself that life wasn't exclusively about lost love, ancient regrets, paranormal beings, grotesque syndromes, and existential mysteries. Talking to a living and romantically attractive man would help her get her feet on the ground. Remind herself that she had her own life, she wasn't just an extension of Julieta McCarty's troubled psyche.

"Hello?" Paul answered. In the background, Cree heard a din of conversation and music.

"It's me-Annie Oakley," she told him. Actually, she thought, at the moment it's more like Calamity Jane. "What's going on?"

"Hey, Cree!" he said warmly. "Oh, the racket? My annual shrink shindig. Didn't I tell you about this? I've got two dozen esteemed members of the greater New Orleans mental health establishment here, supposedly networking but really just wining and dining and telling war stories. We're just getting to the fast-and-loose stage. Hang on, Cree, just a second." She heard him turn away and call out, "Elaine, not that one, please. No, the other. The bigger one. Yes." Then back to Cree: "Hi. Sorry. Why Annie Oakley?"

"Well, it's this Western ambience out here. Also, I just went for a long horseback ride. Out on the desert."

"Oh, yeah? How was it?"

Cree surprised herself by blurting, "Paul, does anybody find love and keep it? Is it ever easy? Or is that just romance novels and fairy tales?"

"Whoa! That was quite a horseback ride. What happened?"

Before she could answer, a burst of laughter came through the phone, and the music in Paul's apartment swelled: zydeco. "I should call back later," she said.

"I could switch phones-"

"No. No, I just called to… I don't know, hear your voice, let you know I was okay. You go back to your guests. I'll call back later, okay?"

He paused. "Yeah, I guess that would be better." Another hesitation. "Cree, listen. I don't know about love-how it turns out, whether it's ever easy. Probably it's not. But I have to believe it's worth the effort. If it's… real, it'll survive anything. Sometimes you just have to… stick with it."

Cree went to her bed and lay down in her clothes. Just a nap. The windows were going dark already, but it was still early enough. She could nap for an hour, then get up and meet with Tommy.

The fat envelope of possession materials troubled her, and to get it out of her thoughts she put it into the side-table drawer. Better. She needed to keep her vision clear, unbiased by either ancient or modern preconceptions. But still her thoughts pestered her.

She didn't understand why her call to Paul should bother her so much. Of course he'd be distracted, with a crowd of guests there. Maybe it was that she didn't even know he held that gathering, which reminded her that there was a lot they didn't know about each other. Or maybe it was that the situation here, Julieta's past and Tommy's entity and the lonely, mystic desert all around, was pulling her away from her own life. As she'd feared it would. She was being tugged out of the warm orbit of love and life and away into the colder reaches. Her efforts to nudge herself back were so easily frustrated. Paul seemed very far away. The way her question had unsettled him showed how uncertain things still were with them.

On the other hand, she agreed with his comment about love: never easy, but always deserving persistence. Love had enduring powers, too, despite all the obstacles. Good to remember.

And it would be good to see Joyce and Edgar. She'd feel more confident of handling this with the two of them around. Joyce was a crackerjack forensic and historical investigator, relentless, adaptive, good at spotting the possibilities in seemingly unlikely links. And Ed: Surprisingly, though his ostensible specialty was physics and though he primarily saw to the technological side of investigations, the most useful, crucial thing he did was talk to Cree. Be there for her. His insight into her emotional processes was deep and subtle. He steadied her and gently guided her through the labyrinth of her own knots, often providing her with the solutions to intractable problems.

As Joseph Tsosie seems to do for Julieta, it occurred to her. Which invited the question whether their motivations sprang from the same source-whether Joseph felt about Julieta the way Edgar felt about Cree.

It wasn't even a question. Joseph Tsosie was in love with Julieta. It was evident in every word and gesture. After listening to Julieta tell her story, Cree suspected he'd been in love with her for a long, long time.

But how did Julieta feel about Joseph? There was a lot of tenderness there, certainly, a lot of trust and reliance. But love? Desire? Need? If not, why not? The questions buzzed in Cree's thoughts as if there was a lot more to consider there.

She drew herself into lotus position, her hands seeking the dhyana mudra, slowing her breath and letting every last thought drain out of her.

A moment later, she caught herself as her head bobbed: She'd almost fallen asleep sitting up. Groggily, she laid her aching head on the pillow and pulled the spread over herself. Already the inside of her thighs had begun to stiffen from the unaccustomed exertion of riding. She liked the feeling. Sleep came in a series of big smooth sweeps, a great hand moving across a blackboard and erasing her entirely.

When she awoke, the room was dark. She pushed the glow button on her travel alarm to find that it was almost eight o'clock. She'd slept for three hours! Sensing that something was wrong, she scanned the dimly lit room and realized that the darkness was flickering. Adrenaline spiked in her fingertips before she noticed that the strobing effect wasn't coming from the night-lights or the ceiling light in the hall. It came from outside. Again and again, the windows flashed and darkened, a racing heartbeat of light.

She stumbled to one of the south-facing windows, which gave a view down the center of campus, the road and buildings lit at intervals by mercury vapor lamps. A quarter of a mile away, in front of the cafeteria, a different kind of light sparkled: the strobe panel on an ambulance van. As she clutched the windowsill, the boxy truck pulled out and turned away toward the main entrance. Its flasher lit the angles of the administration and classroom buildings in fitful red and white lightning, and then darkness steadied around the school as it accelerated out of the main entrance.

Cree could make out several figures, left behind in a cone of streetlight glow. They stood in a clump, looking after the ambulance: Lynn, no doubt, and a couple of other staff members. Standing apart from them, a motionless figure that could only be Julieta.

Cree felt a lurch in her chest, a twang of alarm and devastation and longing, and couldn't tell if it was her own feeling or something sprung from Julieta, the anguish of a mother seeing her child borne away and gone from the insufficient shelter of her love.