Summoned to Tourney (20 page)

Eric followed Elizabet out of the room, out into the garden. The woman sat down wearily on the grass. “How are you doing, Eric? You look tired and stressed out, but not too much worse than that.”

“I’m okay,” he said cautiously, sitting down next to her. “What’s going on with Beth?”

Elizabet hesitated. “It’s a little difficult to explain. What do you know about mental illness, Eric?”

“Not much.”
Not much more than three years with the expensive shrinks my mother hired could teach me. That I wasn’t nuts, but I had to give them the answers they wanted to hear.

“Well, without knowing exactly what happened to Beth last night, all I can guess is that she’s suffering from an affective disorder of some kind—possibly a variation of post-traumatic stress disorder. In layman’s terms, I’d call it extreme shock and the beginnings of a nervous breakdown. Definitely that… she cried for three hours last night without stopping. But she won’t talk about it—without adequate information, there’s no way to know what’s really going on.” She stretched, rubbing her eyes. “I’ll need to get some sleep soon, or I won’t be much use to anyone.” She sat up, giving Eric a curious look. “Kory said something about how Beth thought she couldn’t breathe, last night in the labs. Do you know anything about that?”

He thought about that for a minute. “No, not really. But… Beth’s claustrophobic. And they were underground; I’m guessing there weren’t any windows down there. Could that have caused this?”

“A normal claustrophobia attack wouldn’t cause anything this severe. I’d expect to see high anxiety levels, possibly some fairly serious psychosomatic reactions, but not anything like this. It could’ve caused the elevated metabolic levels she was showing last night, but not any of these continuing effects.”

“What about physical damage?” He had to ask. He had to. “Was she raped?”

The healer shook her head. “No, definitely not. Any damage is completely mental and emotional. But something happened to her in those labs which she won’t talk about yet, and that something is what triggered all of this. And it happened before all of those… creatures… showed up at the labs. By the way, I’d like to talk to you about that,” she added, giving him a very penetrating look.

He flushed. “Later,” he said.

“All right.” She accepted that, as she accepted most things, from elves to frightened runaways. “Listen, I need to get some sleep soon. Will you sit with Beth for the next few hours? I don’t want to leave her alone for too long.”

“Is there any particular reason why?” he asked, concerned.

“I’d—I’d rather not say. Just keep an eye on her, all right?”

Without even thinking about it, Eric reached out to touch the woman’s thoughts. Genuine fear for Beth hit him for the first time, reading the thought that was uppermost in the healer’s mind. “Do you think Beth is suicidal?”

Elizabet nodded slowly. “It’s possible. That’s why we’re not going to leave her alone right now. I’d rather not take the risk.”

He felt an icy touch inside, a cold ball of fear that wouldn’t go away. “I’ll stay with her.”

They walked back inside the house. Upstairs, Beth was asleep, the lines of tension no longer visible in her face. He took over Kayla’s place in the window seat, settling down on the pillows. He leaned back against the sun-warmed wood, feeling the terrors from last night washing away, being replaced by new terrors.

He had never expected this, never thought this could happen. Beth had always been the strongest of them all, the most determined, the one who refused to turn away from a fight. He couldn’t imagine a Beth that wasn’t strong-willed and outspoken, vibrant and always laughing. The concept of a Beth who was so quiet and pale, who cried for three hours without stopping; he couldn’t believe that this had happened, that this was real.

He had been so afraid for Kory, knowing that something awful was happening to him, that he might’ve been dying, that he hadn’t even thought that something worse could be happening to Beth. Now Kory was fine, and Beth was the one who had been badly hurt, and hurt in a way that he didn’t understand.

And himself… the only word that he could think of to label himself was
monster
. Without even thinking of the consequences, he’d summoned the Nightflyers and turned them loose, killing God knows how many people in those labs. He was a monster, as much as any Nightflyer—and they knew it, those strange intelligent shadow-creatures from across the veil of dreams, and they saw him as their leader, one of their demonic horde…

And somewhere in the back of his mind was a strange feeling telling him that now, when there should be nothing left to do but heal, this wasn’t the end of it, a little prescient touch that things were only going to get worse…

CHAPTER 10:
Off She Goes

“I’m not insane, I’m not expendable, and I’m not going.” Susan sat back with her arms folded, glaring at her boss. “The Poseidon Project is at a critical stage right now, and there’s no way in hell that I’m going off to some FBI summer camp to be grilled by psychiatrists for six weeks. If I go now, with Frank and Dave missing, we’ll lose weeks. If you cart me off, we’ll lose months. Maybe more. With all the cuts going on, we might even lose the budget for the project, and that’s insane.” As an afterthought, and with a glance at the tape recorder on the table, she added, “Sir.”

Colonel Steve O’Neill had an uncharacteristically exasperated look on his face. “Your opinion is noted, Susan,” he said dryly. “But I’m up against a wall right now. The boys Upstairs want to know what happened here last night, and so far you’re the only living witness who can still speak in complete sentences.”

“What about Warden Blair?” she asked, remembering her strange encounter with the scientist in the stairwell. “He was there. I think the cause of it was on his floor. What’s more, he’s just as sane as I am. However sane that is. Why not get him to speak his piece?”

“I’ve been told to keep my hands off of Dr. Blair,” the colonel said grimly. “But if this goes on much longer without any rational reasons for what happened, they won’t have any choice.” He sat down across from her. “Susan, can’t you just give me a better explanation of what happened here? This story of floating shadow-monsters just isn’t going to fly in Washington, and you know that.”

She grimaced. “What rationale are they giving right now, Colonel?” Rationale” was not the first word that came to her mind. She wanted to say “fairy tale,” but the tape was still running.

He shrugged. “So far, the only explanations are mass hysteria and some kind of mass hallucination, combined with the kidnapping, defection, or mislaying of fourteen Lab employees. Once the alarms went off, everyone headed down their safe routes to leave the building. The ones who didn’t are either completely
non compos mentis
or missing. I think the Agency boys are still searching the lower levels, in the hopes of finding more of those people.” He shook his head. “The current theory is that some kind of toxin might’ve escaped from one of the sealed rooms and gotten into the air vents, though we all know that can’t happen, because of the security design.”

She refrained from snorting.
Nerve gas, you mean. Or an air-born hallucinogen. And sealed-room protocol doesn’t mean squat when you’re dealing with people who might have been hit with it themselves and have just gone off on their own private trip to Oz. And sealed-room protocol won’t work with something so new the filters can’t catch it. A micromolecule, or a virus, maybe. But you can’t say that, because of the tape.

The colonel continued, blithely unaware of what she was thinking. “So they’re saying it could’ve been deliberate, but there are only ten or fifteen people with security access to all levels, and they’re all accounted for. Another theory is mass food poisoning, but that really doesn’t hold water, either. So far no one is talking about the Japanese, or terrorists, but that can’t be far behind. This whole thing is giving me an awful headache,” he concluded, rubbing his temples.

“At least you weren’t here last night,” Susan said quietly. “I keep wishing I’d kept to an earlier plan of going to the San Francisco Opera with some friends last night, instead of running the data correlation tests.” She allowed herself a single outburst of anger—in part, to help cover her grief. “Why can’t you just put down what
I
saw to a mass hallucination, if you won’t believe me?”

The colonel wasn’t going to be sidetracked, even though she had given him a decent out. “All right, Susan. Let’s go over it one more time, just to see if there’s anything we missed. You were in your office, waiting for the computer to run the comparison tests on the last experiment…“

She nodded, wearily. “It was our first verified successful run. We recorded an energy release with a Richter equivalent of zero point nine, just enough to tap the needles on the seismograph. If all hell hadn’t broken loose afterward, I would’ve been at your office door at eight a.m. this morning, waving test result printouts at you and screaming wildly. Happily, but wildly.”
Why didn’t I go watch Tosca fling herself off a bloody building? Why couldn’t we have run the tests this morning?
But she knew why: because she’d been too excited, too impatient… nothing could’ve convinced her to leave the lab at that point. Finding the exact resonant frequency for that rock stratum and pinpointing the fault… no, leaving the lab at that point would’ve been inconceivable.

The colonel nodded. “After the test, what happened?”

She continued her recitation. Same words, for the benefit of those who would be listening to the tape, hunting for discrepancies. “Frank started to power down all the machines, and that new lab tech, Dave, was helping him with that. That’s when the alarms went off. I knew we couldn’t leave, not until all the equipment was secured, so I told them to keep working, that we’d still have time to clear the building.” She could feel her hands trembling, and fought back tears. “I wish I could go back in time and tell them to get the hell out, screw the equipment. So we were still in there when that first
thing
came through the doorway, oozing right around a closed door. It opened up in front of us, going from a thin shadow to a huge billowing shape. I don’t think Frank even had time to blink, it just fell over him and he screamed, and then he was gone. The kid and I were standing there in shock, and it drifted toward him next, moving slower. I threw something heavy at it, I can’t remember what—probably an oscilloscope or something. That fell right through it, but it paused long enough for both of us to get to the door.”

If I’d gone to listen to an aging diva play an hysterical diva, they’d still be alive.

She heard a rising note of hysteria in her voice and quelled it. “In the hallway, I saw Mira Osaka from Dr. Siegel’s team, just sitting on the floor and staring at her hands, like something was wrong with them. I tripped over her—that’s when the creature killed Dave, it just slid over him like a wave. He was screaming, and I was trying to get free from Mira, because she’d grabbed onto my wrists. I think I hit her, trying to get away, and then the thing was coming after me. It seemed to ignore Mira. I made it into a storeroom, and it followed me in, but couldn’t find me in there. I don’t know why. Then it suddenly turned and left, and I followed it out, and that’s where I saw the guy with long dark hair, the one who was in my apartment this morning.”

Colonel O’Neill reached over and switched off the tape recorder. “We have to talk, off the record. You know what’ll happen if I give this tape to the FBI, don’t you? They’ll listen to it for five minutes, and then cancel your clearance. I don’t want that to happen.” He glanced down at the tape recorder. “All right, this is what we’re going to do. Susan, you’re going to tell me that story again, and it isn’t going to include anything about shadow-monsters or people disappearing into thin air. Or a hippie in your apartment. I’ll rewind the tape, as a friend and someone who wants you on that damn project, and you give me the edited version three times. Here’s what happened. The alarms went on. You tried to get out of there, Mira was in the hallway, you didn’t see what happened to Frank and Dave. They just never came out of the lab.” He paused for a moment, as if in thought. “And while the Feds are going over this report, I’ll send someone over to your apartment to dust for fingerprints. If we get any that aren’t yours, I have private accesses to the national print banks. People who owe me favors. Maybe we can find this mysterious long-haired boy, and when we do, we can get some better answers to all of this out of him instead of you.”

She was stunned. “Steve ...
that’s illegal.
”

“I know, I know.” He shrugged. “Call it a command decision. I’m not going to let this sink your career, not when you’re so close to doing something meaningful on this project. You’re a good scientist, Susan. In all senses of the word.”

She slumped a little, relief making her want to cry again. “Have I ever told you how glad I am that you were assigned to helm this project? I’ve been so afraid of the military applications of this, but you’ve always had the view that we could use this to help people, not kill them. Thank you for that, Steve. Thank you for having ethics.”

“Not a problem.” He smiled. “When we’re done here, take the rest of the day off, Susan. Medical leave. Go shopping, go into the city, do anything you want. Just don’t go home for a few hours, okay? Now, go to the lady’s room. Have a cry. Come back here and we’ll do the tape, then you take the day off.”

“Okay. Thanks, Bossman.” She stood up to leave, and impulsively hugged him.

* * *

Colonel O’Neill smiled at Susan as she left the room, then his face went flat and impassive as the door closed, as though he was only a puppet, with no puppeteer to animate his movements. That was how he felt, when he thought about it… when he was given the license to think about it. Like he was watching a puppet show from within his own mind, seeing himself move across a stage. All he could feel was that strange feeling of distance, of emptiness, as though all of this was happening to someone else. He thought he ought to be terrified, but he couldn’t be, because the emptiness left no room for anything else in his mind, even fear.