From Black Rooms (19 page)

completely nor to keep them from constantly impinging on his consciousness. The continuous assault would inevitably grind away at the man's sanity.

As soon as it became clear that he would have to

dispense with this patient, anyway, Pancrit had decided to salvage some data from the abortive clinical trial by improvising an experiment. Treatment #17 had had the unfortunate side effect of dislodging the soul of the test subject, Marisa Alvarez, from her body, leaving it vacant for any wandering spirit to usurp. Pancrit had found the result intriguing and wanted to evaluate it further. But, of course, the meddlesome Dr. Wax had precluded the possibility of additional study by kil ing the patient. Pancrit had therefore administered

Treatment #17 to Clement Maddox two days ago,

curious to see how soon it would remove the man's soul and how long the body could be maintained in a

nominal y "alive" but soul-free state.

The hydra of insulated electrode wires swayed as Clem shook his head and mumbled, adrift between the shores of waking and sleeping. "Amy...

"Easy, my friend. It won't be long now." Pancrit patted Maddox's immobilized arm, then went to fetch a chair and a clipboard in order to record his observations as the carrier virus finished its transformation of the subject's brain.

Carl Pancrit was six years old when he first saw a human being die.

His parents had gone to Hawaii for a week for their anniversary and left him with his paternal grandmother, a morbidly obese widow who wheezed through her nose from the labor of walking. She'd been puffing harder than usual that afternoon as she shopped at the

supermarket while trying to monitor Carl, who

scampered up and down the aisles in his Lone Ranger outfit, clicking his empty cap gun at the other

customers. By the time they got back to her house, she was wobbling dangerously on her thick heels as she carried the grocery sacks up the driveway from her Thunderbird.

Oblivious as only a boy of six could be, Carl ran ahead to the front door and turned back to fire his six-shooter at her. He didn't so much open the door for her as he left it ajar when he bounded into the kitchen. His grandmother tottered behind him, striving to breathe. She had almost made it to the counter when the paper bags slid from her embrace to spil on the floor, disgorging hot dogs and the chocolate-chip cookie ingredients he'd made her buy. With one hand

massaging the cleft between her heavy breasts, she staggered backward to drop into one of the chairs at the breakfast table, but failed to center her weight on it. It clattered out from under her, dumping her into the puddle of leaking milk and shattered eggs on the

linoleum.

Through the eyeholes cut in his black mask, little Carl watched her fibril ating at his feet. His arm drooped to his side, the cap gun forgotten. "Grandma?" She lifted her head, her jowls slicked with yolk, and rotated her fluttering eyes up to look at him. Her lips plumped into an O as if to push out words like smoke rings, but no sound emerged.

Carl dropped the gun and took off his cowboy hat and Lone Ranger mask; he felt stupid for being in costume during a crisis. Fear frosted his skin. Grandma was sick, and it was up to him to help her. But what could he do?

Run to the neighbors' house? He didn't even know

them.

Nine-one-one did not exist during Carl's childhood, and he did not read wel enough at that age to look up a number to cal an ambulance. But his parents had told him that if there was ever an emergency, he should dial zero on the telephone and tel the operator what was wrong. He hurried to drag a chair over to the wal so he could climb up to the big black rotary phone mounted there.

When he had surmounted the chair and unhooked the receiver, however, he paused to check on his ailing grandmother again. He was scared to talk to strangers and hoped that she might be al right now so he

wouldn't have to cal .

Grandma was not al right. Her head had sunk back into the pooled food, and though her eyes were open, they didn't look at him...or at anything. A tremor shivered her body like the aftershock of an earthquake, and she lay stil .

Carl stood on the chair, his smal hands sweating on the receiver, the dial tone deafening in his ear. He knew that he should be cal ing the operator for help, that he would get in serious trouble if he didn't, but the sight of his expiring grandmother spel bound him. He did not ful y comprehend the significance of what he witnessed, yet sensed that it resided outside the prescribed boundaries of his protected innocence. It fascinated him
because it was forbidden.

He hung the receiver back on its hook and climbed off the chair to crouch beside his grandmother's cooling corpse.

A fright that felt like excitement thril ed him as he knelt to peer into her open eyes and watch the vitreous fluid cloud behind the drying corneas. With one quivering forefinger, he poked the stil -soft, stil -warm flesh of her left cheek. Not so long before, he had learned how to use a magnifying glass to focus a pinpoint of sunlight on an ant to transform the skittering insect into a speck of smoking carbon. This was like that, making him wonder at what point something alive became not-alive. A few minutes ago, the mound of matter heaped before him had been Grandma. What had changed?

Almost an hour passed before he final y cal ed the operator. He did not need to feign terror as he talked to her, for he knew that what he had done was wrong, that he would be punished severely for failing to help his grandmother--that everyone would discover the awful interest he had taken in her demise.

But none of that happened. On the contrary, the police and paramedics who responded to the scene said

nothing but comforting things to him and did not

chal enge him when he said that he'd been watching TV

in the living room and hadn't heard Grandma's fal in the kitchen. They took him to stay with his aunt and uncle, who showered him with sympathy, bought him presents, and offered to cook whatever he wanted for dinner. Even his parents did not blame him for forcing them to return from their vacation three days early. Far from it. They praised his bravery, and his father promised to take Carl on a fishing trip as soon as he felt up to it. When the local paper included a brief item on the "Boy, 6, Stranded with Dead Grandmother," his mother proudly clipped the article and pasted it in her scrapbook.

"What happened wasn't your fault, Carl," they al said.

"You tried to save her."

Eventual y, he began to believe them. The intervening hour between Grandma's col apse and his phone cal to the operator shortened to seconds in his memory. Yet he could not efface the unhealthy fixation on death the event had aroused in him. It underlay al his waking thoughts, like profane graffiti beneath a wal 's

whitewash. Hungering to pose il icit questions, he grew guarded and sly in his pursuit of the answers.

"Where did Grandma go?" he asked his father during their eventual fishing trip.

His dad became preoccupied with casting his line back into the lake. "To Heaven, of course."

"How do you know?" Carl kept his tone plaintive, wistful, so he would not seem insolent.

"The Violets prove it." The glib response made it sound as if no further explanation were necessary. His father acted as if he'd rather be discussing the facts of life than the facts of death.

"Who are the Violets?"

"You'l find out when you're older." That assertion closed the conversation. Carl never raised the subject with his father again.

He chose to explore the undiscovered country on his own instead. When people asked why he became a

doctor, he said, quite truthful y, "Because of what happened to my grandmother." They would nod in solemn admiration, assuming he had dedicated himself to preventing such tragedies. But that wasn't what he meant at al .

In order to observe the transition from this world to the next firsthand, he often had to precipitate the passing of his patients at a time and under conditions that he selected. He cultivated an avuncular bedside manner to put his elderly subjects at their ease, and impressed the next of kin by his steadfast attentiveness to his patients until the very end. Little did they realize that he was there to see the precise moment the light left the patients' eyes.

"What happened wasn't your fault," they always told him. "You tried to save them."

Dr. Pancrit not only tried to save them--he did save them. Saved them the pain and futility of the nub end of this life by delivering them to the next. Far from afflicting his conscience, the certainty of an afterlife exonerated him. What was murder when the soul never truly died? He merely eased his victims' inevitable transmigration with the blessed oblivion of morphine. For his father had been right. When he got older, Carl found out al about the Violets. He read every account of them he could find, pored over every fragmentary description of the afterlife offered by the souls that they summoned. Here, at last, was a direct window into that unreachable, invisible existence that so captivated him. The stories the dead told tantalized without satisfying, however. They spoke of an intangible realm of pure consciousness devoid of senses; there was no sight, no sound, no touch, no taste, no scent, only memory and thought. Legends also circulated about a life beyond this limbo, but since the Violets could not summon the souls who went there to report what it was like or if it even existed, the place remained a fabrication of myth and conjecture. From ancient times, the world's

religions had each tailored their vision of the afterlife to accommodate the facts the Violets divulged, with no means of confirming or denying any of their

suppositions.

For believers like Carl's father, no proof was needed, but an empiricist like Carl Pancrit needed certainty. If the soul was merely another form of electromagnetic energy--energy that Newton stated could be neither created nor destroyed--then its persistence after the body's death did not imply anything. Not God or Satan, not Heaven or Hel , not reward or punishment, not good or evil. The maddening inconclusiveness of the

evidence only inflamed the lust for absolute knowledge engendered that day Carl watched his grandmother die. If he could experience the dead directly, the way the Violets did, instead of secondhand...if he could feel for himself the "cal " of the Place Beyond that some souls in limbo described...then perhaps he could quel the obsession that had possessed him since the age of six. His frustration led him to take greater risks in his research. His timid col eagues began to question his ethics, and the university at whose hospital he worked opened an investigation into his patients' deaths. Fortunately, the North American Afterlife

Communications Corps spared him the indignity of

prosecution, for it, too, wanted to grant others the Violets' necromantic gift. Conduits were far too useful to the NAACC for it to rely solely on the vagaries of Nature to supply them.

"I can tel you're the perfect man for the job," Delbert Sinclair, the head of Corps Security, had said when he selected Pancrit to head up Project Persephone.

"It's my life's ambition," he'd replied at the time. An ambition that he vowed he would soon realize.

The sedative Pancrit had administered to Clement

Maddox wore off after the first couple of hours, after which the patient resumed his hostile outbursts. The leather restraints secured his thrashing body, however, so Pancrit only had to worry about plugging his ears against Maddox's caterwauling.

Checking the SoulScan readout and making notations on his clipboard at regular intervals, Pancrit became excited when, fifty-one hours, fifty-nine minutes, and eighteen seconds after he had initial y given Maddox the Treatment #17 adenovirus, the patient began

experiencing "dropouts": brief lapses when he fel silent and immobile as his brain waves flatlined on the

SoulScan readout. These episodes grew longer over the next hour, coinciding with a growing amplitude and definition of the waves that spiked the bottom three lines of the monitor's display--the lines that signified the presence of knocking souls.

"No...no, you can't stay," Maddox babbled to the ghosts during his infrequent periods of lucidity. "She's
coming, I tell you."

Dr. Pancrit noted the precise time at which the top three lines of the SoulScan smoothed to straightness for the last time: 7:43 P.M. Its quantum energy no longer anchored to mortal matter, the sentience known as Clement Everett Maddox had departed. Pancrit was

pleased to see, however, that the body's autonomic functions stil operated, albeit with increasing

feebleness.

He'd just jotted a measurement of the untenanted

body's pulse when a flurry of zigzags on the SoulScan screen's lower three lines caught his attention.

Concurrently, the body lashed to the padded table stirred, and Pancrit wondered if he had pronounced Maddox's passing prematurely.

Cleared of personality, Maddox's face had relaxed to an almost infantile softness. It retained that ingenuousness as it awoke, but a new persona sculpted a mature

awareness into its expression.

"Clem?" the lips breathed with feminine delicacy. "I'm here, baby. Where are you?"

Carl Pancrit could barely contain his excitement. "Amy Maddox?" he asked.

The dead woman looked at him with her husband's

half-blue, half-violet eyes. "Yes?"

"I'm afraid your husband isn't here anymore."

"I'm too late?" Her gaze wandered, frantic, distressed, as if she expected to see the man in whose body she resided. "He cal ed and cal ed me and I tried to come, but I could never get in."

"I know he longed to be with you," Pancrit agreed, savoring the pathos like bitter brandy. Poor Clem! He had successful y summoned his beloved wife at last, but since he was not a true Violet, she could only inhabit his body after he had vacated it.

"I've got to find him," Amy said. She shut Clem's eyes, closing herself off from the world that had divided her from her lover for so long. On the bottom three lines of the SoulScan readout, the wavelengths stretched to tautness. Amy was dropping out.