Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [86]
The older boy stepped forward and whispered in the ear of the boy who had been burnt. “You passed the test,” he said.
It was Hut. She knew it was Hut. She could see in the boy’s face that it was Hut. Hut was the older boy. Hut helped set the boy on fire. Hut was doing something evil. Something terrible as a child.
The fear rose up in her. The fear grew quickly, like a fire itself in her mind, and she felt Michael’s consciousness grasp at her, trying to tug her back, but the fear shot her out of the Stream and she was once again in her front hall, her back pressed against the front door, but the flashlight had fallen to the floor.
Michael Diamond had released her hand.
“Julie,” he said, his breathing heavy. “I did kill him. But not because of revenge. But because he was bringing things into existence. He was doing something terrible.”
She stood there, breathing heavily also. She crumbled to her knees and sat down on the cold floor.
“You murdered my husband,” she said. “And now you come here with this. This…magic trick. To make me feel things. To make me think you’re not the man who stabbed my husband. Who sadistically killed him.”
“You believe,” Michael Diamond said. “You can’t go back from that. Once you believe, you can’t.”
4
Inside her own consciousness, without the sense that Diamond was inside her, Julie felt a growing belief. She felt it more than she had ever felt anything before. His words: the human soul inviolate. Inviolate. There was something more than just this existence. She’d sensed it, she’d been exposed to it in the past, but she had never believed it because she had no direct experience. But now, here all this was. As if it were meant to come to her. As if it were falling into place for her.
And yet, he murdered Hut.
“I want more,” she said, feeling hungry. “I want to be inside you. I want to see more. I can’t live like this. I can’t be like this. I can’t have all these things in my head. What I’ve seen. What I’ve experienced.”
“It’s unexplainable in words,” he said. “Here, take my hand. Just take my hand. I can bring you back inside me, but there’s something inside you that’s still blocked, Julie. Something they blocked.”
“They?”
“There are at least five of them, still. They’ve done terrible things. Worse than you can imagine. If I were to tell you,” he said.
“Show me.”
5
In the dark, he took his shirt off and crouched down beside her. Then, he guided her hands to his chest. “Accept the Stream,” he said. “I’ll bring you in. I’ll show you what you want.”
Soon, she felt as if she were flying into shadows. She knew from her reading that this was the astral projection that was often written about—the remote viewing, where one consciousness invaded another. And she saw the memory screens—it was like blinking, and each time a new image or moment of his life came up.
From his early life and his first experiences of Ability X (even his language invaded her mind, and she understood and accepted it) when he was seven and his father, in his military uniform, in a boardroom of some kind, tested him with cards, and then with mind games where the boy had to tell what he saw in pictures from his father’s thoughts. The little boy scribbled houses and horses and cats and women and his father each time nodded, and then the boy was in a room with his little sister Margie, and more tests. And she saw the building that was the Chelsea Parapsychological Institute, and she was there when the sleep study began, but his consciousness guided her through these screens, into other memories, after the fire. Of the hospital where he spent nearly a year, and she watched from above as skin graft procedures were done, and painful salt water treatments, and the boy in the bed howled in pain and begged his father to see his sister. Then, the roaming through the open Stream—floating down the halls of the hospital while the pain