The Adept (20 page)

With patience and even compassion, Adam leaned back in his chair and sighed, choosing his words carefully. In everything Peregrine had done today, he had shown himself ready to be introduced more fully to the mysteries that were Adam’s life and purpose. But what Adam chose to tell him now must be weighted very carefully, striking just the proper balance of the familiar with the mystical, lest Peregrine shrink from the destiny unfolding before him.

“As you quite possibly have gathered by now,” Adam began tentatively, “I sometimes act as a physician of souls as well as of minds. In another sense, I suppose one also could say that, like Noel McLeod, I have an additional function as a keeper of the peace. I won’t even try to define my jurisdiction for you just now, but it lies somewhere within that realm of experience that Noel and I, and others like us, call the Inner Planes. They’re a—separate reality, if you will, lying outside of time and material space, but nonetheless accessible to the mind of man through the Interior motion of the spirit. The Inner Planes are the wellspring of dreams, the origin of inspiration, the source of prophetic vision. The ordinary man visits the Inner Planes only by the natural accident of sleep or unconsciousness, and brings back only fractured memories of what he encountered there. The Initiate, however, may journey there at will, in full awareness of what he does; and what he brings back is knowledge.”

Peregrine was listening raptly, still not looking at Adam; but all at once he had the look of a man who has just heard a distant trumpet.

“You’re describing what I do when I paint,” he said softly. “Not the Initiate part—the other. That’s part of what my seeing is all about, isn’t it? That’s where my inspiration comes from. That’s what you’ve been trying to tell me, what my portrait-gallery dream was trying to tell me. ‘Be still, and know . . .’”

Adam smiled. “It seems I should have used the language of the artist from the start. I suspect that further insight may come along when you least expect it. You aren’t frightened any more, are you?”

Peregrine tensed for just an instant, a slightly anticipatory look upon his face, as if probing for a sore tooth. Then he breathed out as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, turning his head finally to look Adam squarely in the eyes.

“No. I’m not.” Adam nodded. “I thought not. In that case, we’ll continue this discussion in the morning. I, for one, shall be curious to see whether you dream.”

Chapter Thirteen

ADAM
left instructions with Humphrey for breakfast at nine. He willed himself to wake at six. Fifteen minutes later, he had showered, shaved, and dressed with the brisk self-discipline of long habit. As he made his way quietly downstairs to the library, leaving his butler and young associate to enjoy a few more hours’ much-needed rest, the house was still and silent.

Peregrine had left his sketch pad on the table before the library fireplace. Adam opened it to the second sketch of Gillian Talbot as he carried it over to his desk and sat down. Rummaging in a desk drawer produced an ornately decorated jeweller’s loupe of antique design, which he set on the desk atop the sketch pad. Then he spun his chair around and propelled himself with a push to the nearest bookcase.

The lowest shelf housed an assortment of maps and atlases. Adam selected a large, fold-out road map of Britain and a world atlas. He hoped he would not need the latter. Pushing himself back to the desk, he set the atlas and jeweller’s loupe aside and opened the map. It covered most of the desk when he spread it out, and he pulled the sketch pad out from under it as he sat back in his chair, tapping it lightly against his hand in distracted speculation as he cast his gaze over the map. Then he drew a deep breath and shifted his gaze to the sketch of Gillian Talbot, fixing her image firmly in memory, before slipping the pad back under the map.

“All right, Gillian, my girl,” he murmured, setting his right hand on the map over the bulge of the sketch pad. “You’re going to have to help me a little on this. Let’s see if you’re anywhere in the British Isles . . .”

Closing his eyes, he set himself to settling into trance, focusing on the sketch pad under his hand, and the resonances echoed in the sketches Peregrine had made. He tried for the Michael Scot connection first, since his personal experience was of that identity; but that facet of the soul he sought was nowhere in evidence on the Inner Planes.

Temporarily stymied, he shifted his focus to the Gillian Talbot matrix. Here, he had less to go on from Firsthand experience, for he knew Gillian: only by the sketches Peregrine had made; but the Gillian identity had the advantage of being currently in incarnation, physically anchored somewhere on this planet. Her astral traces should be easier, than Scot’s to pick up—if he could identify them.

Patiently, eyes still closed, he began running his hand over the map of Britain, mind still and receptive, using a vast, overlapping figure-eight pattern that eventually would sweep across every square inch of the map. As he settled into the sweeping motion, he tried to put the physical appearance of the familiar map out of mind, focusing on the energies, as if they were eddies of current in some vast cauldron to be stirred with his hand. Slowly he began to detect variations within the currents, subtle shadings of temperature and pressure.

He let himself flow with them, letting his hand be a thing apart, letting it quest toward contact with the entity he sought. Slowly, gradually, the sweeps of his figure-eights decreased, at last starting to zero in on a location on the map. When the hand finally came to rest, Adam opened his eyes to see it spread squarely across the city of London.

“Really?”

He stared at the grey cross-hatching of the city in mixed relief and disbelief. To cross-check himself, for London seemed far too easy, he stood and picked up the map, closing his eyes again and turning the sheet round and round, totally at random, before laying it back on the desk.

Again he began his sweeping figure-eights across the surface, again stirring the eddies, looking for the fluctuations. When the hand had stopped a second time, it was once again resting directly over London.

“Well, well,” he murmured. “That does simplify matters. Let’s see if we can’t narrow down the focus a bit more.”

Pulling the U.K. map onto the floor of the bay behind him, Adam pushed himself back to the map shelf again. This time, he selected a large-scale map of the City of London, marked out on the national grid, and a recent edition of the London A to Z Street Atlas and Index. He put the street atlas temporarily to one side and spread the map out flat on the desktop, smoothing it with his palms and scanning it briefly. This time, a more exacting methodology was called for.

He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, palms upturned on the chair arms in a posture of receptivity. A single deep breath relaxed and centered him. A slight shift of weight brought all the lines of his body into balanced alignment with the plane of the floor underfoot. Effortlessly maintaining that equilibrium, he drew another long, deep breath, this time releasing it with a silent petition to the Pantocrator for stability and insight.

In almost immediate response, the image of an unfinished pyramid took shape before him in his mind’s eye. Holding the image, he concentrated on building it up to its apex, carefully adding each course of stones, seeing the pyramid take shape. As he set the capstone in place, the face of the pyramid was split in two, the two halves opening outward to reveal the single, All-Seeing eye at the pyramid’s heart.

A tongue of flame flared within the pupil of the eye. He let the rest of the pyramid dissipate as he drew that ocular fire into his own living spirit. A corresponding point of radiant warmth sprang up at the center of his forehead, at the site of the mystical Third Eye of esoteric awareness. As it grew and glowed, he released the vision and opened his physical eyes.

For a brief instant, the room was bathed in luminous rainbows. Not only could he see objects, but also their auras, projected in every frequency of the spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet. Two items in the room stood out in white: the London map spread on the desk before him and the sketch-pad holding all the images connected with the soul that Adam sought.

The rainbow effect dissipated as Adam brought his vision under the regulating influence of his will. Picking up the jeweller’s loupe, he slid the sketch pad underneath the map as he had done before, then put the loupe to his eye, training it on the upper left region of the map where the area had been marked into squares on a grid. Then, with deliberate care, he began scanning the grid, inch by inch, from left to right and back again.

Names flashed past him, borough by borough: Edmonton, Walthamstow, High Gate. More boroughs—Hampstead, Islington, Hackney—and still no sign of what he was seeking. He shifted his attention down to the next row on the grid and scanned past Stepney, Westminster, and Kensington without getting any response. Then his eye lighted on the area of Hammersmith.

A point of blue light flared beneath the crystal lens of the jeweller’s loupe. Adam paused, adjusted his eyepiece, and looked more closely. A fleeting expression of satisfaction crossed his face as he caught the pulse of blue again.

“So, she’s in Hammersmith, is she?” he murmured softly, sitting back in his chair and lowering his glass. “Let’s see if we can draw the net closer . . .””

He reached for the A to Z street guide, consulted the index, and turned to the pages showing the street plan of the Hammersmith district, south arid west of Hyde Park and Kensington. Weighting the book open with a gold letter-opener, he set his loupe in place again and repeated the scanning process. His survey of the left-hand page brought no response, but when he shifted his activity to the right-hand page, he got a telltale flicker of blue to the south of Hammersmith Tube Station. Closer inspection enabled him to pin-point the location more precisely: Charing Cross Hospital.

Frowning, Adam lowered the loupe and sat back in his chair, pulling the sketch pad out from under the map. He did not doubt that Gillian was there. And as a physician, gaining access to his prospective patient should be relatively easy. He knew several of the senior consultants on staff at Charing Cross, if assistance was needed.

But he had hoped not to find Gillian Talbot in hospital at all. The fact that she was still there gave him a prickle of uneasiness. The reunion of spirit and body should have signaled a return to normal good health.

It was possible, of course, that the girl’s attending physician was merely retaining her for observation, out of professional caution. Healthy children normally did not lapse into spontaneous coma, for no good medical reason. But it was equally possible that the period of soul-separation had been the cause of extensive damage. And if that was the case, Adam reflected grimly—quite aside from the possibility of damage to Gillian herself—his chances for reestablishing contact with the submerged personality of Michael Scot might well be reduced from slim to nought.

But, first things first. Before he went haring off to London, he needed to confirm that Gillian Talbot was, indeed, at Charing Cross Hospital. He trusted his methodology, but whenever possible, it was also wise to double-check one’s findings by more conventional means. Pulling out a London medical directory, he skimmed down the Hospitals section until he found the entry for Charing Cross. While he dialed the number and waited for it to be picked up, he formulated his plan.

“Charing Cross Hospital.”

“Good morning,” Adam replied, deliberately omitting to identify himself. “I’m trying to locate a patient by the name of Gillian Talbot. She would have been admitted sometime yesterday morning. Could you tell me whether you have someone by that name?”

“What was the name again, sir?”

“Gillian Talbot.”

“Hold for a moment, please, and I’ll check.”

The line clicked, then reconnected to a recording of what sounded like the chimes of Big Ben played on a child’s xylophone. Grimacing, Adam glanced at the receiver in disbelief. Midway through the third repetition, the operator’s voice broke back in.

“We do show a patient listed by that name, sir. It’s a child, though. She was admitted to Pediatrics at about half past ten yesterday.”

“That’s the one I’m looking for,” Adam said. “Who’s the attending physician, please?”

“That would be Dr. Ogilvy,” came the prompt reply. “Shall I put you through to Pediatrics?”

Adam had started automatically jotting down the doctor’s name, but his pen paused at the question. He did not want to speak to the unknown Dr. Ogilvy just yet; not until he had invented some plausible explanation for his interest in Gillian Talbot.

“That won’t be necessary just now,” he said, thinking fast. “I know your people are terribly busy, this early in the morning. What times does Dr. Ogilvy usually finish rounds?”

He could hear the crackle of pages being turned.

“She usually signs out by about one,” came the reply. “I expect her within the hour. Shall I take a number, and ask her to ring you?”

“No, I’ll catch her later. I’m not certain where I’ll be. Thank you very much.”

Before the operator could ask any more questions, he hung up, carefully reviewing his conversation as he sat back in his chair. He had avoided leaving his name. Nor, on analysis, did he think he had aroused any undue curiosity. Anyone could inquire about a patient’s presence in hospital, and the name of the attending physician. And by skillful direction of the questioning, Adam also had learned that Gillian was in Pediatrics, and that her attending physician was a woman doctor who had not yet arrived to begin rounds.

Now, if he hoped to gain any more information before actually going down to London, he had best make his follow-up inquiry fairly quickly.

He checked his directory again, hoping for a separate Pediatrics listing, then shook his head and dialed the general number again. His luck held. The voice that answered this time was slightly different from the first one.

“Pediatrics, please,” he said.

“One moment,” came the brusque reply.

Adam drew idle circles around Ogilvy’s name while he waited for the call to be transferred, focusing again as a voice announced, “Pediatrics, Matron O’Farrell.”

“Good morning, matron, this is Dr. MacAdam,” Adam said, using a name he had used before when wishing to retain his anonymity. “You have a patient on your ward, a young girl named Gillian Talbot. Dr. Ogilvy admitted her yesterday morning. Can you tell me how she’s doing today?”

His tone was authoritative but not demanding, as if he had every right to be asking what he was asking. That, plus the cachet of the medical title, apparently diverted any reluctance Matron O’Farrell might have had about releasing information.

“Ah, the Talbot girl. Yes, doctor. She regained consciousness yesterday afternoon, as you probably know, but she’s remained totally out of touch with her surroundings. The house psychiatrist on Pediatrics is to look in on her sometime today, and Dr. Ogilvy has scheduled more tests for this morning.”