The Omega Point

7. DEVILS

A bright light—very bright—brought David’s eyes flying open. Before he could think, he had leaped out of bed, but it was gone now and he was blinded.

He stood poised at his bedside, his heart thundering, desperate for his vision to return. When it did, he saw a shadowy form between himself and the window. Instinctively, he stepped back. It didn’t move, but he could see in the untidy glow of the auroras that it was something fantastic, feathered, massive, radiating a presence he could actually feel, a kind of immediate, spontaneous joy that made him think of the joy of a child, but also another, more fundamental sense of the rightness and balance even of this terrible time, and he seemed to see a deep secret, that the world rides a wire of balance that man cannot break.

No matter how bad things seem, in some deep living heart, the heart of the universe itself, always, all is well.

It was Quetzalcoatl in all his richness and joy.

The emotions were confusing and powerful and the apparition was so real that he drew away from it—and felt, then, the brush of feathers as the thing came right up to him, its eyes infinite pools of kindness, its soft hands caressing him and, it seemed, dipping into his skin as if it was cream, sliding with a quivering, eerie tension, into him. He twisted, he pulled at it, but it drifted between his fingers like smoke, and kept on entering him until it was entirely inside him. Gradually, the whooshing of its feathers was absorbed in the trembling rumble of his heart.

Gagging, his pulse soaring, sweat and tears pouring off him, he retched, then fell against the edge of his bed, then staggered into the bathroom.

He was heaving over the toilet when a cool hand came under his forehead. Shocked, he jumped back and turned—and there stood Katie in white silk pajamas, her hair loose around her face. He tried to say something but had to return to his vomiting, and she held a damp cloth against his forehead as he struggled.

“Let it come,” she said, “let it be.”

It was, frankly, immeasurably reassuring to feel her holding him and hear the calm in her voice.

Finally, the feeling subsided. He straightened up. “I’m sorry. I—my God, that light! What was that light?”

She gave him a quizzical look. Not for the first time he saw past her job to the woman, noticing the sensuality of her lips and the seductive directness of her eyes. They were not gentle eyes, but frank ones.

She guided him back into the bedroom. “I think you had a nightmare, David.” And also, that was the first time she’d addressed him by anything except “Doctor.” She drew him down to his bedside.

“That light—my God!”

“I didn’t see a light. I heard you yelling.”

“I hope I didn’t wake up the whole house.” The medical staff were all on this floor. He did not need to be embarrassed. He did not need to appear weak.

“Just me and Marian.” She gave him a tentative smile. “I told her I’d handle you.”

“I’ve made a fool of myself.”

“You’ve revealed yourself to be a man under pressure.”

“It was weak and unprofessional and I’m sorry you and Marian had to hear it.”

She ruffled his hair. “Is there anything else?”

There was, he realized. There could be. But then he had a change of heart. That sort of fraternization was just a bit less bad than diddling with patients, especially in an enclosed situation like the Acton Clinic was becoming. Or rather, had become.

“Thanks for helping me, Katie.”

She smiled, he thought, a little sadly. “Not a problem. You’re a lot easier than the patients.”

“I should hope so.”

“Incidentally, if you want to read the paper files, could you please ask me in the future, David? I’d really appreciate that.”

“Of course. I was just curious, Katie.”

“Oh, hey. You do know how to use given names. Everybody’s been wondering.”

As if on impulse, she leaned forward, lifted onto her toes, and brushed his cheek with a kiss. He started to speak, but she held her finger to his lips, then waved it. Then she turned and was gone.

The little intimacy had shot right through him, warm and immediate and comforting. The need he had been feeling for a woman surfaced so intensely that he sprang up in his pajamas.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, he took deep breaths, waiting for the desire to subside. He could probably go across the hall right now and have her. That had been a clear invitation. But no, it was a mistake.

And then he thought, That light was real. But the hallucination that had followed—dear God, the pressure was really getting to him, driving itself deep. That had been Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god he was identified with in Herbert Acton’s note. Now he was, himself, integrating the imagery into his fantasy life.

Well, here was some pretty obvious psychology: he wanted to identify himself with the compassionate and healing aspect of the dark religion that was obsessing the world, and had long since seduced this place.

He worried about the light. Finally, he called the guard station.

“Did you notice a flash?”

“Yes, Doctor. But we don’t know its origin.”

“The facility is quiet?”

“All secure.”

He padded across his bedroom and gazed out the window. Katie must not have seen it because it had originated on this side of the building.

Standing, watching the grounds pale in the auroral light, he felt a great surge of compassion for this little community whose welfare had been put in his hands.

But then he saw—could that be real? No, it was a trick of light, surely. But then he saw it again, a supple figure moving toward the copse of honey locust that stood between the parking area and the formal gardens behind the house. Was that somebody heading toward the gate?

He watched the trees, their leaves fluttering in the wind. No, he was sure he had seen a woman going toward the gate—a woman in what looked like a hospital gown.

Not a staffer, then. So, a patient. He went back to his phone. “Dr. Ford again. You guys need to light us up, we’ve got somebody on the grounds. A woman. Heading for the main gate.”

“Got it. I’ll alert perimeter and send a team out.”

As David hung up, the night security officer threw the switches that flood-illuminated the entire property.

A moment later, three uniformed guards, guns on their hips, came up from the gatehouse, and two more from the nearest of the new watchtowers that had been installed along the perimeter.

He grabbed the phone again. “I want a patient census. Every room, including the lockdowns.”

“We’re moving.”

Glen he trusted, and his security team was the best money could buy… but, these days, how good was that? He did not want to end up having to call a family that was paying fifty grand a month to keep their patient safe, to tell them that he or she had left care, especially not naked in the middle of the night.

Should he go down and supervise? No, that would send the wrong message. He needed to show his people he had faith in their abilities—or, at the least, to conceal his suspicions. Only if a patient was apprehended would he go down. If it turned out to be a member of the staff, he’d leave the matter to others.

Still, he might be needed, so he pulled jeans and a sweatshirt over his pajamas, then thrust his feet into a pair of sandals.

His phone rang. He picked it up and Katie said, “Now I see light.”

“A possible patient outside,” he said. “I thought I saw somebody over by the parking lot.”

“Oh, okay. Do you need me again?”

“No, I’m waiting on a census from security. If we’ve got somebody missing, I’ll call you.”

He hung up. A moment later, the phone rang again. “We’re fully complimented,” the security officer said without preamble. “The patients are all in their beds and the staff’s all accounted for.”

“Well, okay, then chalk it up to inexperience.”

The security officer chuckled. “Doc Ullman lit us up twice a week at least. Comes with the territory.”

“Boy, does it ever.” He hung up. The flash of light, the bizarre hallucination, the person outside—were they all somehow connected?

Thinking back, he thought maybe he recognized the woman. That flowing hair—maybe it had been Caroline Light. But she’d been so extremely distraught—or acting the part so well—that he had moved her into a padded room, which meant constant surveillance, so surely she hadn’t managed to just stroll out.

He sank down onto his bed. He was absolutely exhausted and dawn was not far off. But before he went to sleep, he had to face some facts. First, there had been that flash. It couldn’t have been an aurora, they weren’t that bright. Maybe an exploding satellite, but then surely Katie would have noticed it, too. No, he thought that the flash must have come from below his windows, either from inside the building or from the grounds in front. From Katie’s room on the back, it must not have been noticeable.

Then had come the hallucination of Quetzalcoatl. It had been very vivid, but his overwrought and overtaxed mind was the explanation for it.

He was less sure about the presence of Caroline Light outside. That had seemed real. He had been awake, standing at the window.

He decided to look in on her, and not rely on the surveillance system, but do it personally.

He went quietly into the corridor. All the doors were closed, including Katie’s. Even so, a glance up at the surveillance camera at the far end of the ceiling made him wonder who might be watching him besides the guard station, or if anyone there might be part of the opposition.

He came to the door that led to the patient wing, swiped his right forefinger across the reader, and waited for it to unlock. But as he waited, he heard sounds coming from the part of the recreation complex that was in the old house, which included the art room with its tall windows, and the music room. Somebody was playing the wonderful old Steinway that was there.

Immediately, he changed direction and hurried down the service stairway that led from this back hall to the pantry below. At the foot of the stairs, he stopped and listened. No question now. That was Beethoven’s Appassionata, and the pianist was superb. The only problem was that it was nearly five in the morning, and the public rooms were closed.

As he passed through the patients’ dining area and the sound grew more distinct, the superb musicianship made him think that it might be a recording.

At the door to the music room, though, he saw a vague figure sitting at the instrument.

It was a woman in a nightgown, her hair down her back.

Caroline?

No, the hair was straight, not shimmering and flowing like Caroline’s. The woman was wrapped in an enormous robe. As she played, her body moved gracefully. She was easily good enough to go on stage. A member of the class, then?

He knew that he should not approach this person without support personnel equipped with restraints, and he hesitated—whereupon she stopped playing.

“I’m not dangerous, Doctor,” she said without turning around.

He knew the voice. It was Linda Fairbrother. No wonder she had been identified with the god of music. He wished he had her glyph with him. He could test the process. If it worked, he’d awaken the whole class. The time for waiting was past, he sensed that clearly, and he was going to trust his instincts now.

“Linda,” he said, “I think there’s a time for this. Another time.”

She resumed playing.

“Linda, we need to stop now.” Slowly, carefully, he moved closer, until he was standing directly beside her. “Linda, we need to stop.”

She played on.

There was another of the terrific flashes. In the second or so that it filled the darkness, Linda Fairbrother seemed to turn into something else, a complicated creature full of flaring colors—her god, or, as we call it now, her subconscious. And then the light was gone and all he could see were two red dots. But the music never stopped. She didn’t miss a single note.

Unlike him, she had not startled. So she was expecting the flash, she must be.

“Linda, what was that?”

He put his hand on her hand, dropping the music into discord.

She stopped, and in the silence, he heard something unexpected—a hissing noise that had been covered by the sound of the music… which, he thought, was meant to have been covered by it.

It came from the art room.

“Linda,” he said, “what is that?”

She sat staring into the dark, silent.

“Linda, I need you to step out of here because that sounds like a major gas leak, and I’ve got to—”

Another flash, and again he was looking at the fluttering, dangerous, wonderful deity of music.

Whatever was happening in the art room had to be dealt with. He went to the wall phone and snatched it up, only to find that there was no dial tone. Wonderful.

He called back to Linda, “You can play, go ahead and play.” He didn’t need this one to be wandering right now. But the music did not start again and he had to prioritize. Clearly, the possible danger to the whole structure took precedence, and he pushed his way into the art room.

At once, his eye was drawn to the kiln, out of which there glared an unearthly blue light. Here, the hissing sound was a roar. There were figures clustered around the furnace—it was no kiln, that could not have been more obvious. They were wearing welder’s masks.

“Excuse me!”

As if in a nightmare, nobody seemed to hear him. He went right up to them, but here the light was so intense that he had to shield his eyes.

“This has to stop!”

He saw a big square tray from the kitchen’s baking department. On it was a measure of white powder, and two of the concealed figures were carefully pouring it into tiny jars, mixing it with a liquid. Others took trays of the jars toward the kitchen.

A yellow flash so bright that he was ready to believe he’d been blinded forever this time came out of the furnace. In it, though, he saw something completely unexpected, not glowering Aztec gods but a beautiful field, a green and smiling land, incredibly detailed. It was there for only a second, but it was as if he was actually in this field.

Then it was over—and there was a smattering of applause. Applause! And still they were acting as if he wasn’t there at all.

An instant later, he saw the face of Caroline Light three inches from his own, the eyes tight with anger, but also—what was it? Humor? The kindness, he thought, and the danger of the gods.

Then the room was filled with clouds, beautiful, soaring clouds just becoming visible in the light of the predawn. Clouds… he was looking up at clouds.

Dear heaven, he was in bed! He was in bed and those were the clouds of his ceiling, one of the many trompe l’oeils in the mansion.

As if the mattress was on fire, he jumped out and onto the floor. But nothing was on fire. He was simply alone in bed at dawn, that was all.

But no, that couldn’t be. It could not be. That had not been a dream, nobody dreamed that elaborately, it wasn’t possible.

He was still in his jeans, anyway, so he went back downstairs.

There was nobody at the piano and the kiln was dark. But, God, how disorienting. What had happened to the time?

Exactly.

Whatever they had been doing with the kiln had affected not just the brain, inducing hallucinations, it had, he thought, done something to space-time itself. Warped it, twisted it, sent him racing across the hours from three o’clock until dawn in just seconds.

He went to it, opened it, and thrust his hand into the firing chamber. A faint warmth was all he felt, exactly as if it hadn’t been fired since yesterday.

But he had seen Caroline Light in here, and Linda Fairbrother had been in the other room playing music to cover the sound of the superintense fire.

They’d made some sort of powder, he had seen it. And they had also been fools, because everybody in the place must have noticed the flashes, except for the staff in the four bedrooms on the far side of the building, and maybe them, too. Maybe Katie had lied.

What a hell of a situation. What was real? Who could be trusted?

Those people could. That had been the class, and Caroline had been there. They could be trusted. But who were they?

She must be waking them up. Of course she was, they’d been taught to use the glyphs and she was doing it.

Not all of them, though, and not the ones likely to be needed the most, they were still trapped in their various insanities.

It was while they were making that powder that space-time had gotten all twisted. So the opposition was going to try to take it. Therefore, bloodshed was coming.

He took the stairs leading to the second floor of the patient wing, running up, then through the door and down the hall to the central nurses’ station.

“Nurse!”

Nurse Fleigler came up from behind her small, electronically dense station.

“Doctor?”

Behind her was a bank of screens. Cameras covered each room from two directions. A computer continuously analyzed sounds, and immediately warned her if there were any screams, breaking glass, thuds, any sound suggesting violence. It also warned her when a room became too quiet.

“You’re up early, Doctor.”

“What kind of a night?”

“We had a security check. Some lightning flashes. Aside from that, it’s been quiet.”

David noticed movement in Mack Graham’s room.

“What’s four doing?”

It was perfectly obvious that the man was engaged in sexual self-stimulation.

“This is the third time tonight. He claims that he’s entertaining me.”

“He’s been in there all night?”

“Absolutely.”

“Have any confinement patients been recorded outside of their rooms tonight?”

She shook her head. “What’s the matter, Doctor?”

Could those have all been staff members? But no, he’d seen Caroline—or had he?

“How’s Caroline?”

“I’ve got a good sleep signal. Normal breathing pattern. REM sleep.”

“But she was agitated earlier, after Claire left her?”

Fleigler nodded, her plain, broad face registering sadness and, perhaps, a degree of accusation.

“The poor woman—she did not like that locked door.”

“I want to see her tape, if you don’t mind. Just roll it back to, say, three, and play it for me.”

The screen flickered, then flashed, and he saw what at first appeared to be a static image, but the status readouts confirmed stage four sleep, heart rate fifty-seven, breathing regular.

There was a flicker on the screen. “What was that?”

“What?”

“Roll it back.”

She did so. The flicker repeated.

“Run it slow.”

He watched Caroline sleep. Were the flickers caused by the flashes from the art room, or were they edits that concealed Caroline’s comings and goings?

“So everything’s been quiet? Definitely?”

“Quiet, Doctor.” She looked up at him, her brows raised in a suggestion of question.

On his way back to his suite, he came face-to-face with the fact that mystery was piling on mystery, and he was drowning.

Using the fingerprint reader on his door, he entered his suite. He returned to the window where he had seen Caroline disappearing under the trees. Ripped clouds sped past the low moon, and, to the north, lightning now flickered. The east was red with dawn.

He tried the Internet, but it was useless. Finally, he called security.

“How many of those flashes did you record?” he asked.

“Two sets of two each.”

It was still over an hour to breakfast, and he was profoundly exhausted. He threw off his jeans and T-shirt and returned to bed. It was so very strange to draw these gorgeous silk sheets up around himself in the context of the world as it was. There was jeopardy all around him, but the bed was here, the sheets were soft, and the mattress even somewhat tolerable. He closed his eyes and began to drift… and found himself having to will his mind away from the image of the woman running in the night, and thoughts of Caroline Light.

He redirected his longing toward Katie Starnes. Her dark Gaelic eyes and cream-white skin were well worth a few moments of presleep contemplation. He shouldn’t have been such a damn fool when she’d offered herself. He needed to fix that.

He wondered what Katie actually knew about this place. She hadn’t been in the class.

It was as this thought was forming in his mind that he slipped through the invisible door into sleep. His breathing became more steady, his shoulders relaxed, his lips parted slightly. After a moment, his body turned onto its right side, entering its preferred sleep position.

The dreams were immediate and once again he was facing the kiln, watching it flare with that amazing light. Then the broad clearing once again spread out before him. There was thick grass. A distance away was a tall oak, its leaves spring-fresh. Beside it was a thickly blossomed apple tree. In fact, the scene looked very much like the clinic’s grounds, but in far, far better days. Caroline Light was there, standing near the trees. She gestured to him, smiled and gestured again.

He thought that this sight of this woman in this place was the most beautiful and compelling thing he had ever seen.

Then there was a crash, followed by a long, retreating rumble, and he was again in bed. More crashing thunder and, coming with it, more flashes, but ordinary lightning this time.

He opened his eyes. Seven ten by the clock. More than an hour had passed in a sleep that seemed to last only a few seconds. Outside, thunder roared and bellowed, and lightning flashed.

The first thing on his agenda this morning was yet another staff meeting, more bad news about supplies and infrastructure, he supposed.

He thought that he needed to understand more about that powder. He needed to gain the confidence of the makers.

He should damn well remember it from the class but he didn’t… or did he?

Gold? Was it connected with gold?

Rain struck the tall window behind him, crashing torrents of it, and the great house groaned from the pressure of the wind, and the eaves mourned.

Exhausted, confused, and deeply, deeply afraid, David prepared to meet his day.